Harold Pinter wrote these short plays for television in the early 1960s, during his "weasel under the cocktail cabinet" prime. They may not be meaty works, but they can lean over and give you an unexpected slap. In Jamie Lloyd's frisky new productions, they are cheeky and steeped in Englishness - rancid with sexual repression and lip-curling social contempt.
In The Lover, Sarah (Gina McKee) is a horsey suburban wife and Richard (Richard Coyle) her City husband. She has an afternoon lover, he has an afternoon tart. When hubby is at the office, she changes into something less comfortable and awaits her fancy man - who, of course, is Richard, easing a leather jacket over his pinstripes and calling himself Max. Nowadays, they'd be dogging behind Datchet services; here they role-play.
(Bit of rough grabs maiden: "Come here, Dolores.") There's some highly charged play with drums, and, after he has fingered the bongos, they disappear under the table.
What is horribly plausible is that neither is turned on by the dress-up lover so much as by the person they themselves briefly become. As Sarah, McKee slides into her call-girl heels with a kittenish shiver. However tired the game, at least it's not their middle-class reality. McKee looks so pale, as if she has never left her show home, attending to the blinds as if adjusting the bars on her cage.
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The characters in The Collection are in the fashion business - "You don't belong to the Rags and Bags Club, do you?" - and are showing this season's porkies. Stella may have slept with Bill in a Leeds hotel, or not; her jealous husband and his older boyfriend (Timothy West) uncover and obfuscate the truth. Given how little fun anyone has here, chances are nothing happened. Facts seem less important than desperate speculation. Cuckold turns stalker, as the husband (Coyle) becomes obsessed with laughing boy Bill (Charlie Cox) and returns home to taunt Stella (McKee) about their new friend: "A man's man. Straight from the shoulder."
Everyone speaks fluent innuendo: "I bet you're a wow at parties." Even the props are saucy - Bill takes a tumble over the pouf and gets his cardigan wet. The play is often taken to have a homoerotic subtext, but with nervy dialogue taking place at crotch level, I'm not sure subtext is the word.
With everyone fibbing their tongues dry, bodies may offer a scrap of truth. Coyle's enthralled husband, standing close to Bill, gulps so hard, he almost swallows his adam's apple. Who knows why West denounces Bill as a "filthy putrid slum slug"? But he works himself into beetroot consternation. McKee's legs are genius, buckling with faux submission, cantering about like a giraffe in fetish wear.
Rehearsing the first stage production of The Collection, Pinter notoriously rebuked an actor for leaving a two-dot pause when three were specified. Lloyd's cast is sprightly with the dialogue. And the brisker they are, the bleaker: even home truths sound like glacial small talk. No wonder Noël Coward appreciated Pinter. The chatter might be snatched from Private Lives: "How sickening you are, how tepid." Caught in solitary shafts of light (beadily designed by Jon Clark), the characters work hard to mine their pleasure.
According to Pinter's biographer Michael Billington, these plays demonstrate that the playwright is "an instinctive feminist". And indeed, if getting flustered when an ice maiden with great legs bosses you about is feminism, then Pinter is right up there with Simone de Beauvoir. These women may win the game, but is it really a game worth winning? Winding a mummy's boy round your finger? Keeping hubby on the leash?
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Casting a cold eye at aspiration, alarmed by their own roiling sexual fantasy, these plays are most convincing about the company of men. What, as Freud never bothered to ask, do men really want? Coyle is wonderfully supple as both husbands, puffed up then undermined, each finding his own fetid imaginings and emotional turbulence more interesting than any real contact with his wife. McKee's women are vulnerable and equally bereft. In between threats and hurling cutlery at each other ("I've got a splendid cheese knife"), the chaps maintain a terrifying sociability as they paddle to work it out: "What are we drinking?" For all the carry-on, these are lonely plays.
Comedy, SW1