The Room / Victoria Station / Family Voices Tickets

Harold Pinter’s very first play, The Room, is just one of three splendid one-act plays featured in this very special production, itself one of seven celebrating a total of seventeen Pinter classics. It's a triple-bill beautifully directed by Pinter’s colleague and friend, Patrick Marber. And it marks the much-anticipated Pinter at the Pinter season, taking place later this year at the gorgeous Harold Pinter theatre.

The Room examines in typical Pinter fashion the all-too familiar and always scary type of of English xenophobia we see all the time over here. It runs like a glittering thread through the piece, which is both darkly funny and disturbing. It's also really odd and eccentric, always an extra treat with Pinter in the driving seat. Written in 1957 and considered the earliest example of Pinter's legendary 'comedy of menace', it is similar to his second play, The Birthday Party, full of dark comedic dialogue that manages to be both mundane and frightening, funny and moving.

Victoria Station is actually really amusing, a hilarious ten minute romp consisting of radio dialogue between a minicab controller and a taxi driver who has stopped his cab alongside a gloomy park in Crystal Palace. When the controller tries to get the driver to pick up a client from Victoria Station, he refuses. He's more concerned about his current client, who may be either asleep or dead in the back. What should the controller do to get the driver to move?

In the beautifully reflective play Family Voices,  a series of isolated voices try to communicate, but it becomes clear that as flawed humans, we can never really express the depths of our feelings. This is the tale of a mother, her son and her dead husband. They speak to one another via the letters the mother and son have written to each other and through actual dialogue. And the father speaks from the grave, "Just to keep in touch". The resulting  series of interlocking monologues is spoken by voices one, two and three.

Who is this show for?
Harold Pinter's work is clever, complex and created for adults. If you're a mature 16+ you will probably enjoy it very much.