"The Lover". Keble O'Reilly

Harold Pinter was never happier than when he was writing about male-on-male relationships. 'The Caretaker', 'No Man's Land', 'The Servant', 'The Birthday Party'... they all allowed him to explore the games men play with each other - sexual, intellectual, coercive - untrammelled by the inconvenient presence of women. Sure, he did also write about women, but depressingly often ('The Accident', 'Betrayal') those portrayals were solely from the perspective of extra-marital affairs and how they impacted the lives of those poor, misunderstood men who were forced to seek love and solace beyond the marriage bed. When his women do have any agency at all, it's usually as guardians of conventional, middle-English family values.

All of which makes 'The Lover' a fascinating outlier.

Written close to the start of Pinter's career, 'The Lover' is a two-and-a-bit-hander in which the woman gives as good, or as bad, as she gets. In a disturbing, dirty little satire of bourgeois life in the suburbs, the husband and wife in this play are only able to maintain anything resembling a loving relationship by indulging fantasies in which they each take on the role of the other's paramour.

Although the sexual see-saw dips slightly but predictably down on the male side as ever (the husband ultimately is the one with control, and he freely wields the weaponised word of 'whore' while the wife entertains only her 'lover') this is very much a hard-fought draw in the battle of the sexes. Is it a comedy of manners or a tragedy of miscommunication? Or both? That's down to the individual production.

Raphael da Silva and Gabriel Stoney have brought fresh ideas and imaginative staging to their interpretation. Whether those ideas amount to a powerful and persuasive reading of the text, I'm not entirely sure.

In Georgina Cotes and George Loynes, da Silva has a couple of actors who are more than up to the task of capturing Pinter's superficial candour laced with threat. Cotes shimmers between frailty and mockery, lust and panic, with barely a flick of the eyebrow, while Loynes pads around her, an emaciated beast of prey with a sneer always at the ready. Their little sex games are on full display, but they don't quite let themselves go with the full erotic charge they've worked so hard to fuel. Kisses are perfunctory, invasive groping almost apologetic. For a theatre of hate, it's perhaps a tad polite. 

The set, decked entirely in bland white, reflects the superficial conventionality of the characters' lives, while the Freudian depths of their fantasies are displayed on a screen above the obligatory drinks trolley. These psychedelic projections are the most stunning and disturbing part of the show. With paranoid spirals, dismembered octopuses and women's bras being poked by a stick (in a surreal way), they are both fascinating and sickening, like early David Lynch art school projects. They effectively imbue the intervening scenes with a sense of being in the foothills of the Mountains of Madness.

Unfortunately, though, they go on for a very, very long time.

There are no scene changes in 'The Lover', but there are plenty of costume changes. These are mostly done on stage and seem to take forever. It creates a major issue with the pacing of the production, as we sit patiently watching yet another mind-control video while Cotes slips into her pyjamas/wet-look rubber/tea with vicar outfit in the background. It's not made sufficiently clear where our attention is meant to be. The costume changes are on stage but unlit by the stage lighting, so are we supposed to watch them or the dismembered octopus? If the costume business is supposed to be visible, then you can't help feeling it should be made so, rather than being neither one thing nor the other.

Pace is also problematic in the amount of pausing included in the show. Pinter of course is famous for his pauses. As he himself said, 'It's in the pauses between our words when we can't quite figure out what to say that our vulnerabilities are revealed.' But you have to be selective with your pauses. Make them an occasional treat, and they work especially hard for you. In this production, if anything, there are too many pauses. They pop up every minute, and after a while that undermines their dramatic weight.

Another interesting idea here is to update the action from 1960 to modern day. Mobile phone tones trill in the background, and the costumes give great midriff. It overlays the play with contemporary urgency, asking whether the fantasies of yesteryear have become the coercive trolling of our own age. But at the same time, this updating is only half done. The husband's and wife's timbre of voice is still deliberately 'poshed up' like old-fashioned BBC newsreaders, and they have leant into the artificiality of Pinter's style, rather than making it sound 'natural'. Making Pinter sound natural may not be obvious when you read the script, but it actually allows the weirdness of his cadences to do the work on their own. When done right, it sounds more like drama, and less like adolescent poetry.

This production gives with one hand and takes away with the other. It's bursting with creative, fresh and thought-provoking ideas. If it only focused a bit more on the (perhaps slightly humdrum) areas of stagecraft and pacing, it would be a milestone reinterpretation. [Pause]. What's your opinion?