Reviews

'The Lover' at Downstage

Harold Pinter's The Lover is a witty but not at all amiable play. The current production for Downstage demonstrates these Qualities unwaveringly. Dick Johnstone brings out all the elegance and all the horror; his production is as rigorous and uncompromising as the play itself.

The keynotes are grace and dignity, which form over the play a calm and glassy exterior. Everything is polite and regulated, the characters like the music. Everything is ordered and controlled. Everything is partitioned off.

But then extraneous features, hinted at from the first, begin to intrude. The words "lover" and "whore" have not shattered the pattern: but the appearance of characters in these roles is subtly horrible, and the glassy surface cannot remain undisturbed.

For Pinter's play works through the juxtaposition of at least four quite different characters: the husband, ever reasonable and polite, and the more flamboyant lover; the wife, all delicacy and wit, arousing a feeling of pride, and the whore, with neither wit nor delicacy, who engenders only lust. Through the medium of the bongo drums these characters are joined fantastically and primitively: what is horrible about The Lover is not the politeness as such, but the doubling of the parts.

It is horrible that lover and husband, wife and whore, turn out to be the same people. It is horrible that in neither role does the one partner understand the other —each is more effective in the role the other finds more distasteful: her husband loves Sarah as a wife, but she is more content with him as a lover. In their ironic parody of sex and communication, Richard loves a woman who loves him in return only in the role he despises, when she plays what she calls the "mistress" and he the "whore."

As the play develops the distinctions blur between the two sides of each character; the politeness is shatttered. Unpleasantness continues until the final fusion of the characters, which is in fact the transfusion of lover and mistress into the marriage—in the final moments of fantasy one is left with a certain exhilaration.

But the verdict is nonetheless harsh. Sarah has become the mistress within the marriage, but this has meant that Richard first had to take over the role of lover, with all the disrespect for Sarah that it involves. By trying to separate love and lust, Sarah and Richard have ensured that lust would triumph. Their extraordinary attitude to sex. and the paralysing isolationism of their relations, have not been dissolved; rather they have become all-pervading.

The Lover is more complex than this over-simplification would allow; that it should be so striking is very largely a tribute to the professionalism of this production. The acting is consistently impressive —the skill and subtlety of Peter Bland's subdued Richard combines splendidly with the force and the pathos of Alice Fraser's Sarah. The control of these performances allows the pattern of the play to evolve, and their studious civility gives power to the developing crisis.

There may be room for reservations about this production as about the play— the set is not as brilliant or useful as the lighting and sound; at times the dialogue —remarkably for this theatre —is not entirely audible. But the overall impression remains: this production was quite unmistakably excellent.

—P.G.R.