The Birthday Party, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, review: Zoe Wanamaker and Peter Wight are superb

This starry, meticulous, beautifully considered revival demonstrates the play's undiminished power to disconcert

Zoë Wanamaker and Peter Wight are superb as Meg and Petey in 'The Birthday Party' (Johan Persson)

It’s coming up for 60 years since the London premiere of this Pinter play notoriously sent the daily critics into an orgy of incomprehension and derision that closed the show in a week (“What all this means only Mr Pinter knows,” opined one reviewer, “for his characters speak in non-sequiturs, half-gibberish and lunatic ravings.”). Ian Rickson marks the anniversary – in the theatre that was renamed in the author’s honour – with this starry, meticulous, beautifully considered revival that demonstrates the play’s undiminished power to disconcert.

Rickson is a skilled Pinter hand: not only does he have excellent revivals of Betrayal and Old Times to his credit, but he directed the playwright himself in a masterly performance of Krapp’s Last Tape. He knows better than to give this latest piece the kind of surreal makeover that Jamie Lloyd gave to The Homecoming recently. His production first establishes the bog-standard normality of the seedy seaside boarding house set-up before it is infiltrated by the absurd in the shape of two besuited sinister strangers who interrogate and abduct its sole lodger, a washed-up pianist called Stanley.

A situation from the world of weekly rep is ripped open to the horrors of modern history. With wallpaper peeling at the seams in the Quay Brothers’ design, this run-down establishment exudes musty decay, even at the height of summer, while the mud-spattered net curtains that stir like a scrim between scenes emphasise how the audience is put in the position here of being eavesdroppers on events they cannot fully understand.

This a production that finds fresh colours in the play. Zoë Wanamaker and Peter Wight are superb as Meg and Petey, offering far more than grotesque caricature. There’s an undercurrent of wistfulness in Meg’s prattling vacancy – the sense that she is a childless woman who yearns for a male child and now coyly mothers her sole tenant to the verge of incest. Wanamaker is very funny (buckling in prim, pained outrage that Stanley will use a word like “succulent” to a married woman) but her absent-mindedness seems to be a way hiding from herself some distant tragic hurt.

A wrecked, unshaven cherub in his pyjama jacket, Toby Jones is excellent as Stanley, who selfishly resents and relies on her pampering and who deflects his own fears by ruthlessly stoking hers. He has a habit of striking matches and gazing at the flame as it burns down, but he suppresses this apparent fatalism in his initial fierce resistance to the intruders. I’ve seen Stanley played as though Goldberg and McCann were simultaneously objective figures and projections of his own most deep-seated guilt. There are hints of that here but the production, which flows with admirable spontaneity, does not labour the point.

Stephen Mangan and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor are an impressive double act as the respectively Jewish and Irish interlopers from Kafka. Mangan is always perhaps a shade funnier than he is frightening, but he brings out to perfection the note of bullying bonhomie and off-colour insinuation in Goldberg’s idealised memories (“Good? Pure? She wasn’t a Sunday school teacher for nothing”). He’s well matched with Vaughan-Lawlor’s combustible McCann, the unfrocked priest fighting to control his taste for violence. The irony is that this pair are shown having their own private crack-up before they cart off the brainwashed Stanley to unspecified horrors.

Peter Wight beautifully suggests Petey’s decency and the terrible shock to his system when he realises that he has been powerless to help. A richly eloquent production – not to be missed.

Until 14 April (thebirthdayparty.london)