Claudie Blakley as Sarah, and
David Morrissey as Richard
in The Lover
Theatre Royal Bath
March 2023
Photograph by Nobby Clark
078 – The Lover and The Collection, by Harold Pinter
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We have a double-bill on the programme in this episode – two short plays written by Harold Pinter back in the early 1960s when his fame was very much on the ascendant. The first is The Lover, which initially appears to be a conventional sex comedy involving infidelity in a middle-class marriage, but which contains a twist that turns the play into a darker exploration of sexual compulsion. Pinter’s biographer, the theatre critic Michael Billington, described The Lover as “an absolute gem…one of the most candid and revealing plays about sex in the English language.” It was first written for TV and broadcast in March 1963, before being staged at the Arts theatre in London in September that year, both productions starring Pinter’s then-wife Vivien Merchant as Sarah.
The second play in our double-bill is The Collection, written a year earlier than The Lover, but which also explores the impact of apparent adultery, in this case on the relationships of two couples. All of the parties involved come to promote different versions of events in their attempts to manipulate others, such that they, and we, are left uncertain as to what the truth might be.
The Collection was also first written and presented as a television play in May 1961, and then produced on stage by the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, which Pinter co-directed with Peter Hall, in June 1962. The Financial Times described the play at the time as “an under praised little masterpiece.”
As we record this episode a new production offering a double-bill of both of the plays has just opened at the Theatre Royal in Bath, directed by Lindsay Posner, with David Morrisey leading the cast. Loyal listeners will recall that Lindsay joined me to help pay homage to Michael Frayn’s comic masterpiece Noises Off in episode 58, and I’m delighted to welcome Lindsay back to the podcast to talk about these two Pinter gems.
Other plays by Harold Pinter covered on The Play Podcast:
006 – Betrayal
075 – The Homecoming
Lindsay Posner
Lindsay Posner has a remarkable list of theatrical credits as a director, both in the UK and internationally. Most recently he has directed three productions at the Theatre Royal in Bath, including The Lover and The Collection, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and A View from the Bridge, which transferred to the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London’d West End. He also has directed Noises Off on two occasions: first at the Old Vic Theatre in 2011, and then again at Theatre Royal Bath in 2022, which as we recorded our episode on the play in January 2023 arrived in London’s West End.
A fuller list of Lindsay’s credits can be found here on his guest page.
Lindsay recommended People, Places & Things by Duncan Macmillan.
The Footnotes that accompany our episode on Harold Pinter’s two short plays The Lover and The Collection, include observations on the portrait of Sarah and Richard in The Lover as a conventional bourgeois English couple and their divergent ideas of sexual identity, and on Pinter’s clever dual construction of The Collection.
112 – Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
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David Mamet’s modern American classic, Glengarry Glen Ross, is a blistering commentary on the cut-throat reality of the American dream, and its poisonous impact on those who have bought into the myth and machismo of that dream. The play had its world premiere in the small Cottesloe theatre at the National Theatre in London in September 1983, and was first performed in New York the following year, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Mamet also wrote the extended screenplay for the star-studded 1992 film version.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play was playing at the Old Vic theatre in London, with an all-female cast. This is a particularly provocative idea, because one of the primary themes of this play is masculine identity, and the salesmen in this Chicago office do not hold back in their display of machismo.
To explore Mamet’s unflinching slice of 1980s dog-eat-dog capitalism, I am joined by arts journalist Mark Lawson.
111 – The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
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Bertolt Brecht’s ‘gangster spectacle’, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, is both an exuberant and funny piece of theatre, and a chillingly topical political satire. Set in the 1930s Chicago of Al Capone, Brecht presents a parody of the rise of Hitler through the character of the gangster Arturo Ui. The play is a universal cry for vigilance against the rise of unscrupulous, populist leaders who threaten democratic societies and global peace.
As we recorded this episode a new production of the play by the Royal Shakespeare Company was playing in Stratford-upon-Avon, starring Mark Gatiss as the title character.
I am delighted to be joined by both the show’s translator, playwright Stephen Sharkey, and by Brecht scholar, Professor Tom Kuhn, to guide us through Brecht’s political parody.
110 – Our Town by Thornton Wilder
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Playwright Edward Albee described Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as “the greatest American play ever written.” In fact Wilder’s quintessential portrait of rural America in a bygone time has somehow transcended its iconic American setting to become a universal meditation on mortality, community, and how we live our individual lives, wherever that may be.
The play premiered on Broadway in 1938, winning Wilder the Pulitzer Prize, and it has been a staple of school, amateur and stock performance ever since. In fact, according to critic John Lahr writing in the introduction to the text of the Penguin edition, “the play is performed somewhere in the world every day.”
Howard Sherman, author of Another Day’s Begun – Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century, joins me to explore this American classic.
Michael Sheen as the Stage Manager in Our Town, Welsh National Theatre, photo by Helen Murray.
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