Under the moonlight, this serious moonlight

There’s a moment in Moonlight, Harold Pinter’s last full-length play, when Andy, a petty patriarch on a drab deathbed, accuses his wife of monopolising the love of his estranged sons. ‘They always loved their loving mother’, he rails, Lear-like. ‘They helped her with the washing-up!’  

Uttered with poisonous invective here by David Bradley, it’s a reminder of Pinter’s knack for locating fraught family dynamics in the most ordinary of domestic details, then presenting them with biting, bitter comedy. But although Bijan Sheibani’s production is peppered with such great moments, there’s plenty of stodge to sit through between them.

  Moonlight has always been an elliptical text. It is a play about waiting, whether for death, for a family visit, for reconciliation, for meaning – hence the incessant comparisons to Beckett. But it’s also a family drama, and thus its abstract nature is at odds with our natural urge to understand the full narrative, with the Schadenfreude and curiosity that emerges when we glimpse a window onto other families’ dysfunction.