Landscape / A Kind of Alaska Tickets

Landscape and A Kind of Alaska are on your menu for this, The Pinter at the Pinter season, which celebrates the great man's work from September 2018 to February 2019. It's set to light a roaring fire under theatreland so if you're a Pinter fan – or have never experienced his legendary work - walk this way for the experience of a lifetime. It's going to be wonderful!

Pinter can be brutal. Frighteningly so. But these two one-act plays, Landscape and A Kind of Alaska, both directed by Jamie Lloyd, are gentler, dreamier, slower a couple of spellbinding evocations of loneliness, isolation and the uncanny, odd and disturbing behaviour of time.

In Landscape, first broadcast on radio in 1968 and originally performed on stage in 1969, the difficulties in communication between two people in a marriage are explored in typical Pinter style. Their troubles are cleverly illustrated by the two characters' conversations, which seem to be taking place with each other, but at the same time neither party is quite able to hear what the other is saying. The dialogue, being more like two independent monologues, reveals the difficulties of being understood, a subject that's just as relevant now as it ever was.

A Kind of Alaska, written in 1982, was apparently inspired by the playwright reading Awakenings by the famous neurologist Oliver Sacks. When the middle-aged Deborah awakes from a twenty nine year sleep, she remains suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness. She has been in a coma for three decades thanks to encephalitis lethargica, and awakes with the mind of a sixteen year old girl trapped in the body of an ageing woman. Her family tries to ease her back to her current reality, while at the same time do what they can to protect her from bad news.

Who is this show for?
This production isn't for children. Harold Pinter wrote complex, intellectual plays for adults which are probably best enjoyed by mature over 16s.