Theatre Review: sex in suburbia | Harold Pinter | The Lover | Jack Courtney | Mark Shaer

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The Review - THEATRE by NELL MASKELL
Published: 11 June 2009

Pinter’s Sixties suburbia

IT'S’ the early-Sixties. Legend remembers it as a time of sex in suburbia, bored housewives drowning their dreary days drinking sherry, indulging in furtive affairs to make monotonous and mundane lives more bearable. Was it really like that?
Harold Pinter’s The Lover is a fascinating play, excellently performed by Robyn Pinkney as Sarah and Mark Shaer as Richard, with a cameo role by Jack Courtney as John, a comic yet menacing character.
The play explores the world of a respectable and mutually loving bank manager and his wife – but we learn a little more about the torrid world each inhabits when he goes off to work leaving her to her own devices!
Directed by Jack O’Connor, it is set in a detached house near Windsor and the couple conduct themselves with apparent respectability in the mornings; however, the afternoons follow with a sequence of erotic and bizarre rituals. It seems that both husband and wife have lovers and entertain an open marriage beneath the bourgeois facade.
In his masterly way, Pinter makes us laugh – but we are left thinking about deep themes: power and politics (especially sexual), desperate attempts to survive monotony, philistinism in an unrealistic world.

• The Lover is on at the Acton Community Theatre, Acton High Street, W3, Fri-Sat 8pm, £6, concs £5. 020 8992 4557, Until June 13.

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