‘Backspin’ is a young people’s theatre company dedicated to staging new interpretations of the plays of Harold Pinter. Their latest choice, performed by students from the St Paul’s Schools at The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, is ‘Moonlight’. And it’s an intriguing choice, because this play is at once very Pinter and very un-Pinter: there’s less grit than we probably expect, and its twist is not as horrible as in ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘The Birthday Party’, yet its sketch-like form makes it into a space where Pinter’s dramatic techniques are compounded and showcased. Suddenly, with this play, what makes the actors succeed or fail is not so much how they carry the story but how they realise these dramatic elements; the demands of Pinter’s theatre are now undisguised and even brutally foregrounded.
Lydia Free tackles the nuances of the character of Bel, and her performance deserves the highest praise. She acts with an intensity and subtlety which allows her to move from knitting wife reminiscing about her convent school days, to blunt wife sparing no one’s feelings with her excavation of her and her husband’s lives of illicit lust, to heartbroken wife and mother watching her husband die and accepting that her sons will never come home. She navigates the more-often-than-not-self-contradictoriness of these feelings with an impressive maturity, and the interactions between husband and wife bristle with the tensions of a power-play.
Because, yes, this is a double act. Charlie Hill as Andy displays marvellously the verbose man, full of expletives, reduced to his deathbed and forced to reminisce about times past in all their glory and frustration. The tone changes even in a single scene from confident mockery to terrified posturing about what happens when we die: and Hill leads us seamlessly through it all. His accent and mannerisms are perfectly pitched and consistent throughout the play; Andy’s dying moments are loud and visceral: the audience was silent.
Silence – both in the audience and between the actual characters on stage – is one of Pinter’s most renowned theatrical weapons: and one of the elements of his drama brought to the fore here as part of the Pinter showcase. Hill and Free use the silences to express the relationship between them. In Free’s case it is a way of gaining power over her garrulous husband; for Andy silence is exactly a sign of his impotence, and that he has been defeated. Silences in the interactions between the brothers, Jake and Fred, played by Harry Church and Marcus Dunfoy, arise as part of their almost-flawless rhythm: these two have clearly rehearsed until their dialogue is polished yet still dynamic, riffing off one another and pitching in at exactly the right moments to create something that is almost musical as well as verbal. Charlie Fisher as Bridget uses silence theatrically in her white dress in the white light, pausing to draw attention to her ethereal form and to let her last words, her list of flowers or description of the moon, hang in the air. Meg Hatfield also plays with silence as Maria, captivating the audience with her wonderful enunciation and the pauses in between, rolling the words off her tongue and creating the scenes and images with her body and words so that the audience cannot help but be transported to the moment she is describing.
Hatfield’s approach to Pinter’s language is to indulge it – and indeed linguistic indulgence is something that this production does very right. The characters play games with words, from the brothers who reel off lists of names in the fantasy they have created for themselves, to Bel’s interrogation of the phrase ‘taking the piss’. The tendency is almost obsessive, as Pinter’s characters fixate on a word from another’s speech and carry it through all its possibilities until it has become a whole new reminiscence which is only distantly related to the original scene. Actors in a Pinter play need to savour their words, think up connections between them, know what each word means and what it doesn’t mean, and become obsessed with language: and I have to applaud these actors for doing exactly that.
What I have suggested here is that it is the words which matter most in Pinter. This is mostly true, but I think where this play could have gone even further was in its physical movement. The stage is not the biggest, and I certainly understand why director Christian Anthony chose to emphasise the stasis of each set of characters confined to their portion of the stage, never overlapping with the others, especially in the glorious ‘Chinese laundry’ phone call scene. But I think it could have been effective to have the characters – or, in particular, Bridget and the brothers – move around more of the whole stage during their speeches, between and around the other still characters. Breaching the tripartite set before the ending, I think, would have emphasised the emotional distances in the family relationships: and how powerless any of the characters are to cross them.
But it’s all about interpretation. And what I felt as I watched is that these actors have picked a reading of their characters and gone through with it, and that this production of Pinter is this group’s unique interpretation. These performers are not content just to be passive readers of Pinter: they are willing to add their own voices to his creation. Such bravery in such young performers is not to be waved away lightly.