Pinter Two, the second leg of the Pinter season, offers us a pair of one-act comedies. The Lover is a surreal pastiche of married life. A suburban housewife has a paramour who visits her daily while her husband is at work. The husband knows of his rival and discusses his wife’s infidelity as if it were a normal aspect of marriage. He toddles off to the office and a little later the lover arrives: it’s the husband. They begin a game of role play. The wife is a whore and the husband is her trick. This neat device dramatises the theory that marriage is prostitution in disguise.
Director Jamie Lloyd presents the show as a paranormal absurdity. Garish pink dominates the couple’s weird, rectilinear home. Pink walls, pink doors, pink shelves, pink everything. The husband and wife speak in clipped uber-posh accents like two robots programmed to imitate stupid toffs. It’s funny enough for a while but Pinter can’t develop the script beyond its opening premise and the cartoonish performances by John Macmillan and Hayley Squires start at maximum volume and have nowhere else to go.
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