Pinter at the Pinter

Thanks for the help all, I'd like to see as many of these as possible just balancing price vs managing a diary!

What's the running time at the mo?

Press night isn't for a couple of weeks, so they probably don't know the fixed run time yet. Try tweeting them?

It was hours 20 when I saw an early preview.  Longer first act with Mountain Language and One for the Road and the other bits and bobs and then Ashes to Ashes in the second act.  As noted above there is a full curtain call after the first act as all but Paapa Essiedu and Kate O'Flynn presumably get to go home!

Looking at previous productions:

Mountain Language - 30 minutes
One for the road - 45 minutes
Ashes to Ashes - 1 hour

So 2 hours 20 sounds about right to 2 hours 30 sounds about right

Just back from Pinter 2 (I haven’t seen Pinter 1).

TodayTix Rush, which turned out to side row P. Perfect view of the stage although would have preferred to have been nearer as Hayley Squires was a little quiet.

Two interesting one act plays, no classics.

Play one, The Lover, starred John Macmillan and Hayley Squires (brief Russell Tovey cameo). Played for fun. An audience phone went off with a horrible modern pop ringtone,

Play two, The Collection, featured all four including David Suchet, but mostly focused on John Macmillan and Russell Tovey. A much stronger piece, fun, but also hinting at the challenges of two men living together behind closed doors. And Russell Tovey did have a brief underwear scene.

Theatre pretty full with spare single and double seats dotted around (and an almost empty row two rows behind me).

It’s a snappy production.

Start 7:30
Interval 8:15
Second half 8:35
End 9:25

All the bows together at the very end.

Credit really to John Macmillan, who wasn’t off stage very long and did a great job with the material. But all the cast are strong.

Lovely. Booked. That brings back lovely memories of that football play he did where he spent most of it lolling about drunk in his tighty whities.

I hope his dog makes an appearance. And I mean his real animal dog not his....

Then again....

Well. I managed to give Jamie Lloyd the slip again. You won't catch me you little pocket director!

I enjoyed Pinter 2 far more than Pinter 1. 'The Lover' was fun enough but 'The Collection' was a whole bunch of jolly japes and with fewer pauses than I'm used to in a Pinter which probably shaved off a good 43 minutes of the running time. I could happily sit through it again. David Suchet sports a rather delightful cape (I want it when he's done with it) and seems to be having an absolute whale of a time and quite rightly so, he's really rather smashing even when he's revisiting his Lady Bracknell. But Russell Tovey is rather deliciously brilliant and it's a terrific performance, rather camp, very very funny and filthily suggestive, particularly when it comes to a cheese knife. And the fact that when he's not dressed in a lovely number of outfits with shirts so tight that they are in danger of stopping circulation, he spends a rather nice chunk of time in a very tight pair of pants which leave nothing to the imagination made it all the more enjoyable.

I laughed for ages at "you've made me spill it on my cardigan" too for some reason.

I agree with Ryan re David Suchet and especially Russell Tovey in The Collection. It seemed to me that Tovey was doing a full on Ricky Gervais, the voice, the manner, everything - and doing it brilliantly. But Suchet was also wonderfully way out there and his "slum slug" speech was one for the ages.

The other two actors, John Macmillan and Hayley Squires, were good but not particularly memorable. They had The Lover to themselves but couldn't quite make it work because of Jamie Lloyd's cartoon like take on the piece. Not for the first time with Pinter, Lloyd has seen fit to have his actors heighten their performances into something slightly grotesque - see The Homecoming and The Hothouse of recent memory. Pinter's plays are already highly stylized and need no such embellishments.

Re the cat, there was a line reference to it in The Collection which Suchet made the most of so I suppose the creature was needed. She was immaculately behaved.

Looking to see Pinter two next week but was wondering if anyone has any offers of things like that as the cheap seats are all very restricted. Thanks

seen they do rush seats on today tix but would maybe like something a bit more certain. 

Saw The Lover and The Collection tonight.

"The Collection" is brilliantly acted, and the funniest Pinter I've seen in 5 years.

Some spoilers follow. . .

While all Pinters are a combination of comedy and menace, most directors seem to favour the menace, at the expense of the comedy. Sometimes, this can result in a Pinter play being unduly oppressive, unrecognisable as reality, and ultimately predictable and boring.

This is NOT the case here, primarily because Russell Tovey's beautiful combination of naturalism and playfulness constantly throws the play into unexpected and unpredictable terrain.

The text of the play positions Macmillan's character, who makes midnight phonecalls and unexpected appearances, as the tension driving agent of potential chaos, whereupon Tovey does two things:

(1) Firstly, he acts like he isn't in a Pinter Play, responding with the same bafflement, bemusement, nonchalance, and faint worry that any normal bloke would;

(2) Secondly, he graces his normal bloke with such a wild sense of playfulness and mischief that over the course of the play, he morphs into the principal agent of chaos.

Imagine you woke up one day, and everybody who spoke to you spoke with an undercurrent of malice and threat. Your life is a Pinter play, and you can't quite believe it. Now imagine that you start to get used to it, and start playfully and provocatively and daringly making mischief out of all the tension around you, because you are a bit of an arse at heart.

That's what Tovey does. It is at once both utterly real and incredibly funny, and it reinjects Pinter with the wild unpredictably he used to have before we all got the hang of him.

Couple Tovey's brilliant performance with David Suchet's most effectively funny performance in years, whose stiff ostensible politeness contains limitless reservoirs of caustic rage, Basil Fawlty style, and this is just a wonderful, worthwhile, surprising and hilarious evening.

The other play is amusing, but it's twists have a predictable pattern, so it's too easily grasped. Still it's a good extra, with Macmillan stiff and Squires loose, which is both fun and funny.

4 and a half stars for"The Collection;" 3 and a half for "The Lover."