I was at today's matinee. First of all, I love Pinter and I know this play very well even though this is the first time I have seen it in performance. The audience was attentive, and there was a nice response, if not overwhelming, at the end of the performance. There was a lot of discussion afterwards in the lobby - and most people had at least an opinion about what they had seen rather than an outright rejection.
I did not think it was a "bad" performance at all, although it was ultimately disappointing. Let me start with what I didn't like at all: the music and the set. The pre-curtain music is very loud and very irritating which probably means it is doing what the production intended: aggravate the listener and accentuate the silence that follows. But the fact that the music came back as underscoring during the performance really drove me nuts because Pinter isn't the kind of work where you want music to give you a hint about what you should be feeling! And the set - ugly, distracting, symbolic. Again, not the sort of thing I associate with Pinter. The revival of THE HOMECOMING as few years back had the perfect Pinter set: quite ordinary, drab and detailed and realistic, to contrast with the human curiosities occurring in it. It really isn't Beckett or Sartre.
Now for the actors. No glaring deficiencies but no feeling that any one of the participants was born to play the part either. How can I explain this? They all played the pauses, and the silences, perfectly. Very natural - the searching for the right word, trying decide whether to lie or not, trying to wait out the hearers and maybe not give an answer at all. What didn't work was the spoken text. I expected to hear each character speaking differently to each of the other two, and the tone of the performance seemed to be too uniform as though it were, in fact, what it appears to be on its surface: three people in an awkward kind of reunion. It started out well - Eve Best's first speech, the wild excited ramble about what it was like to be young and poor in London, contrasted beautifully with the monosyllables that preceded it. But then it started to feel routine. Perhaps a little too fast, as an earlier poster noted? If this is a play about the tricks of memory, there ought to be a pacing issue to remind us that we are not being told the truth and the characters may not be consciously lying. If the entire play had the impact of Kelly Reilly's final speech - no spoilers here - I might have felt more satisfied.
So - it may be worked out over time, but it doesn't quite come together. My guess is that Douglas Hodge may not have figured out how to help his actors use the discomfort that Pinter loves so much. I kept getting the sense of "Really everything is fine, isn't it darling" rather than "How can you possibly think that is what I meant?"
If I got a free ticket, I would go back later in the run just to test my reaction. But this was a pricey buy-in for me, so I'll leave well enough alone for now.
And I do love Pinter - every word is there for a reason.
