In Celebration of Harold Pinter: A Kind of Alaska/A Slight Ache

Published Friday 31 March 2006 at 16:25 by John Thaxter

After the Nobel Prize and the Turin ceremonial comes the Gate’s own tribute to Notting Hill’s most celebrated figure, a well-intentioned resurrection of two early one-act pieces given in an intimately arranged end-staging..

A Kind of Alaska was Pinter’s first to be inspired by an existing work: Oliver Sack’s study of patients waking from sleeping sickness. A woman is suddenly returned to life from a 29-year narcoleptic trance, believing herself to be only 16, although vaguely conscious of having been on a strange journey in a sort of Alaska of the spirit. But faced with her sister she rounds on her accusingly with: ‘You’ve aged - substantially.’

When first staged at the National in 1982, Judi Dench created an extended, enchanting image of her struggles to walk. Here it becomes almost matter of fact, quickly ending with a stumble and Anna Calder-Marshall never entirely convinces as an adolescent locked inside the body of a 45-year-old. But Niall Buggy is strongly cast as the tactful neurologist, forced to recognise that his patient’s awakening is more of a nightmare than sleepful oblivion.

A radio piece from 1959, A Slight Ache remains a play for voices, although this new staging opens with a fine Pinteresque exchange for Michael Byrne as Edward and Diana Hardcastle as his wife Flora, an affluent couple who trap and kill a wasp over the breakfast table, before dealing with an annoying blind match-seller standing at their back gate.

Summoned to Edward’s study, the smelly tramp remains a passive figure but in a role reversal Edward has a stroke and ends clutching the tray of mouldering matches, while his wife enjoys an erotic experience before leading her guest off to lunch. A disturbing end to an absorbing evening.