By FRANCIS TILL
Harold Pinter is a playwright who never finishes what he starts: he leaves that to his audiences.
In the wrong hands, this can be disastrous for directors, performers and, ultimately, audiences, because his ideational scripts are so difficult to render down into motivation. Actors are required to create a
human drama from a complex welter of often contradictory passages and unlikely events.
Conversely, any Pinter production that fulfils only its human story will fall miserably short.
Exhale Productions directors Kirsty-Emma Gray (Alaska) and Natalie Hitchcock (Ache) do an admirable job of navigating this difficult divide.
The pacing on opening night was a bit too quick for the polyphonic texts and subtexts to blossom fully, but the performances in both plays are polished, resonant and complete.
Pinter's one-act plays are frequently staged together, and this is a particularly interesting mix. Written for radio, Ache is among the most concept-centric of all Pinter's short works. Alaska, on the other hand, is based on actual events of enormous sentimental power and must therefore derive its intellectual potency from the smallest of touches within much larger emotional tugs.
First up for the evening is Alaska. Widely and mistakenly considered one of Pinter's most accessible works, Alaska's context involves the "awakening" with often horrifying results of a group of catatonics suffering a rare condition, Encephalitis Lethargica, decades after they were stricken.
Here, it is Deborah (Nancy Schroder), an era-specific girl of a "laughing nature" who went still as a 16-year-old in the 1930s and is awakened after 29 years to confront a sudden, ridiculous, terrible reality: she has lost the living of her life.
Judy Dench created this role in 1982 and left a formidable, often copied, legacy. Schroder breaks away to reinvent Deborah, with resoundingly satisfactory results.
Stephen Papps (Dr Hornby) and Josie Ryan (sister Pauline) anchor Schroder with deeply nuanced performances.
Part two is the 1959 "comedy" Ache: part lampoon, part evisceration. The magical villain, a hawker of matches (Steve Wright), places himself outside a well-ordered middle-class home inhabited magnificently by poseur Edward (Michael Lawrence) and ultimately perfidious Flora (Madeleine Lynch). The wheel, as it must, turns.
Like much of early Pinter, the characters could not exist today but the dilemmas do, and show better for the remove.
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