Harold Pinter did not originally write either of these plays for the stage. The Lover was a television play first broadcast in 1963; A Slight Ache was written for radio in 1959. Here, they are presented as a double bill with the idea that in the second play we see older versions of the same couple.
The Questors have chosen to present The Lover with two different casts, one significantly younger than the other. Director David Erdos explains his reasoning in the programme as “we can see how the woman over a period of time soon takes hold of both the home and the heart”. In the double bill I saw today, Richard in The Lover and Edward in A Slight Ache were played by the same actor, David Hovatter, which gave an additional frisson to the idea of fantasy, roleplay, and abandonment.
Pinter’s plays are always deliberately oblique. We don’t quite understand what we are seeing at first, until the stories shift and the scales are lifted. In The Lover, we are led to believe that the married couple are both enjoying infidelities, but instead they are playing an elaborate game that has echoes in other plays such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or The Maids.
In A Slight Ache, the couple are older and fixate on a matchbox seller, a mute old man in dirty clothes, who stands outside their gate. When I saw this at the National Theatre in 2008, it was staged with a long, slanted table, but here it is much more prosaic, with a tea table, study, and a hint of the garden outside. It is no less vicious, with Wendy Megeney‘s Flora being particularly still and scheming – as well as being wickedly funny.
Both plays offer a peek into the world of power exchange. Richard in The Lover first plays the wounded cuckold, whose wife entertains when he is stuck at the office, but slowly we start to see there is something else going on. In the cast I saw, Hovatter’s Richard is teamed with Varvara Barbouni’s Sarah, whose vivid red shoes and barely controlled passion pinpoint the truth of their marriage.
When, after the interval, we meet Edward and Flora, they carry this weight of the past with them. Edward seems terrified of the matchbox seller, and clearly subservient to his wife, who babies the visitor and seems to use him to fill the weight of an empty cradle. Iain Reid is both matchbox seller and The Lover‘s milkman, cheerily offering the housewife additional cream.
Carla Evans has created a set and costumes that clearly pinpoint both the 1980s (The Lover) and 2008 (A Slight Ache). Furnishings, props, and clothing all suggest a place and time, and setting both plays in the same two-level house with just a slight change here and there really works. Small moments like drowning the wasp in the marmalade pot attain clear significance; an open-plan mezzanine allows A Slight Ache in particular to work with wicked clarity.
I’m giving this 3.5 stars. The Lover is the more successful of the two plays, with its decadent deviance and casual cruelty. A Slight Ache would potentially be stronger as the opening of the duo, and the realistic depiction of the matchbox seller doesn’t always hit the mark, especially in the opening scene.
The Lover / A Slight Ache are at the Questors Studio until 26 Sep.
Photo credits: Kat Brown