Summing up what Pinter’s plays are ‘about’ is like trying to catch smoke. Part of their appeal lies in Pinter’s defiance of traditional storytelling structure. Madness and menace feature in both A Slight Ache and Landscape, currently a double bill on the Lyttleton stage at the National Theatre with Clare Higgins and Simon Russell Beale. Both plays focus on dysfunctional relationships between couples who cannot communicate; exploring the seething undercurrent of violent despair that fills the void left behind when intimacy departs.
It is hard to imagine actors and writing of this calibre not combining well and Iqbal Kahn’s productions do not disappoint. In A Slight Ache, Higgins (Flora) and Beale (Edward) are joined on stage by Jamie Beamish as the terrifying but pathetic matchseller onto whom they both project their darkest fears and desires. Beamish never says a word but still manages to give an extraordinary, riveting performance as the matchseller becomes the couple’s lightning rod.
A Slight Ache is perhaps the more theatrical of the two pieces in the sense that more happens on stage but the two principals come into their own in the shorter Landscape: two overlapping monologues delivered from either end of a long table. The couple never look at each other and such is the subtlety in Clare Higgins’ performance of Beth that she seems almost spectral, the ghost of a memory in the mind of Simon Russell Beale’s embittered Duff.
Much of the brooding atmosphere can be attributed to Ciaran Bagnall’s excellent set, costumes and lighting for both plays – all the more important in intense psychological drama of this kind.
Appropriately Meltdown Monday was the first performance of what is surely the best value 2 for 1 deal in a newly cash strapped city.
