Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Moonlight
Donmar Warehouse Theatre Spring
2011
Harold
Pinter's 1993 drama is a meditation on death, grief and missed
opportunities that is, paradoxically, frequently very funny in a black
comic whistling-in-the-dark way.
It is elliptical and impressionistic almost to the point at times of
being pure poetry. In Pinter's signature mode we are not told things -
facts, backstories, motivations - that we would be a lot happier
knowing.
In addition we
are presented with characters who all address and express their emotions
through indirection and evasion, so we only catch glimpses of their true
feelings in passing or as they slip through the speakers' defences.
The result is either fascinating and enthralling or off-putting and
boring, and while leaving the theatre I heard audience members
expressing both reactions.
A man sits in bed close to death, but with enough energy left to trade
insults with his wife and complain about the absence of his sons,
daughter and grandchildren.
The sons are
estranged from him, the daughter is evidently dead - though the
character appears, she is identified in the cast list as a ghost and in
a programme note as a suicide - and you begin to sense that the
grandchildren are fictional, perhaps the man's way of not addressing the
daughter's fate.
The sons, meanwhile, appear trapped in an indolence that approaches
paralysis, evading their emotions through comic role-playing and word
games, while the ghostly daughter continues what was probably her
lifetime desire to not bother anyone.
(There's also
another couple, friends and possibly former lovers of the parents, whose
brief appearances may or may not be real.)
What we are seeing are the end products of a broken family, everyone
crippled in one way or another by the broken connections, unable to
acknowledge the need for each other or to function without each other.
In that context the most nearly functional character is the wife/mother,
who plays her husband's games and, in a brief telephone conversation,
her sons' and thus manages to maintain some tenuous touch with each.
The key to making the play work is in letting us see, however vaguely,
things about the characters that they don't want to expose and may not
even know about themselves, and director Bijan Sheibani has guided his
cast to an almost ideal level of sensitive allusiveness.
David Bradley shows us that the father's nastiness and casual cruelty
are a frightened raging against the dying of the light, while Deborah
Findlay, while almost never expressing open emotion, hints at the strain
of keeping up the coolness that is her only tie to her husband.
As the more inventive of the sons Daniel Mays lets us understand that
his constant game playing is a loving attempt to keep his brother from
slipping into total despair, while Liam Garrigan makes us believe that
brother's near-stasis even as we wish we understood it better.
A must for all Pinter lovers, this revival might be a bit risky for
those coming to the playwright for the first time, though the potential
of being fully captured by it is worth taking the chance.
Gerald Berkowitz
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