As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme.
Here he starts off as another lugubrious chauffer, awakening in an even more chaotic world than that of the Somme, before morphing into the charismatic, careworn but chatty interrogator in the torture cells of a faceless, totalitarian state. The occasion is the first professional revival in London of Harold Pinter’s double-bill, Victoria Station and One for the Road since its opening in 1984.
The setting is The Print Room , the small Notting Hill studio theatre, which has fast become one of the most exciting fringe venues in London, largely thanks to Lucy Bailey, the acclaimed director who co-founded the theatre only last year.
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