Victoria Station / One for the Road, The Print Room

reviewed for The Spectator, 27 September 2011

As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme.

Here he starts off as another lugubrious chauffeur, awakening in an even more chaotic world than that of the Somme, before morphing into the charismatic, careworn but chatty interrogator in the torture cells of a faceless, totalitarian state. The occasion is the first professional revival in London of Harold Pinter’s double-bill, Victoria Station and One for the Road since its opening in 1984.

The setting is The Print Room, the small Notting Hill studio theatre, which has fast become one of the most exciting fringe venues in London, largely thanks to Lucy Bailey, the acclaimed director who co-founded the theatre only last year. And the finished product reaffirms what I’ve long suspected about The Print Room: that every production it programs turns into a must-see.

One for the Road has traditionally been seen as marking the start of the second half of Harold Pinter’s writing career, a period dominated by the playwright’s increasingly political rage. Pinter’s widow, Antonia Fraser, states that the play was inspired by a Pinter’s infuriating meeting with a pair of Turkish women who claimed not to mind their government torturing dissidents; another story has the playwright stirred up by his confrontation with a Turkish ambassador who was more shocked by Pinter’s use of the word ‘genitals’ than by the real use of electrodes against the genitalia of Turkish prisoners.

But while it’s true that Pinter became more unsubtly political in later life (hence that execrable poetry), the sharp concern in One for the Road with the power dynamics of intimacy seems to have more in common with Pinter’s previous work on human violence rather than with political agitprop. Doyle’s nervously affable thug, desperate to be needed by his victims, could be one of the bullies in The Birthday Party, Pinter’s first hit. Thanks to Doyle’s bravura performance, this monster is as desperate to woo his victims into accepting him as a drinking buddy as he is to see them damn themselves.

Distractingly, there’s still much in Jeff James’ production of One for the Road that is overwrought, even sweaty. As his victim, Keith Dunphy is a broken, jabbering mess, whereas Pinter’s world is at its most chilling when the downcast are more yielding, more subdued. The violations endured by his wife, a convincing Anna Hewson, are evident enough in the taut dialogue, but James makes a reductive decision to expose her onstage with sexual jibes scrawled in marker pen across her skin.

It’s a touch that makes the implicit suddenly explicit. It might succeed in making the audience a voyeur (while humiliating Hewson), but it also focuses too much attention on the simple physical manifestation of brutality, in a play much more concerned with the line between psychological exploitation and interdependence.

It is this same conflict of exploitation and interdependence that drives Victoria Station, and it is in this brilliant, more darkly comic sketch that Keith Dunphy really shines. Dunphy is the wise-cracking, hard-driven Controller of a fleet of taxi cabs, while Doyle is a hapless Driver.

Control, as the appellation of Dunphy’s character implies, is the real issue here, but where One for the Road plays with the theme against the more obvious setting of torture cells and political dictatorship, Victoria Station delicately sketches out the same underlying relationships between men imprisoned in the metal cages of taxicab and office cubicle. The Controller, like the torturer of One for the Road, assumes the titles of God, but Dunphy comes into his own in embodying the frenzy of man discovering his own impotence, his petty microphone the vehicle to his tottering dictatorship.

Doyle’s doleful face serves him well as the cabbie who awakes, like Rip Van Winkle, to a supposed collapse of identity and memory, although as the play races towards its conclusion there’s a hint that he may not be the harmless innocent he appears. Overall, it’s a terrific piece, expertly executed, which shows off Pinter’s unique knack for exposing the everyday menace underscoring our institutionalized relationships.

And at forty-five minutes, the entire double bill takes up less time than the average person wastes each day in daydreams, although it might need audiences craving some comfort-dreams to counterbalance the quick journey into nightmare.