The Room (by Harold Pinter), Joshua Brooks, Princess Street, Manchester, 28–30 September 2015
I would highly recommend you take 50 minutes out of an evening next week to scratch your head and hold your breath at the absurdity and intensity of a Pinter play. This depiction of The Room has been thoughtfully considered and excellently realised by the Just Talk Company, whose smart set and costumes and talented actors displayed a level of professionalism surprising for such a young company – co-founded by director, Kezi Gardom, and producer, Catt Belcher. You can leave the production as you usually might a Pinter play – exhilarated, confused, trying to work out what happened – or you can stay on for the Q&A session afterwards, and let the cast do the work for you as they describe their approach and unique, socially conscious interpretation of the play: aiming to raise awareness about the effects of dementia, with money from programme sales going to an Alzheimer’s charity.
The Room was first performed in 1957, and considered the precursor to Pinter’s subsequent play The Birthday Party and other ‘comedies of menace’ – in which the audience is disarmed by a painfully familiar, often darkly humorous depiction of the mundane through dialogue and setting, only to suffer an increasingly brutal, dramatic awakening to the underlying menace. In The Room, Rose (Lucy Ross-Elliot) and Bert (Ethan Martin) are attempting to live a quiet, secluded life in a bedsitting room in a rundown shared house. A sense of claustrophobia is created as we learn, repeatedly, that the couple are sandwiched between a dark basement below and damp flat above – so lucky to have such a nice room. And while the bright lighting and set create a cosy, warm and safe atmosphere, this is increasingly dismantled, at first subtly – a symbolic painting of a wintry scene on the wall; frequent references to the cold, unpleasant weather outside; the state of the rest of the house – implying Rose and Bert are trying to cocoon themselves from a threatening outside world and this cannot last long. The venue – Joshua Brook’s small, dank underground cellar – also added to the atmosphere and facilitated immersion, though due to the close seating arrangements I found it a little hard to see.
The play opens on Bert reading a newspaper while listening to the Top 40 on the radio. With mention of Judas Priest and Grace Jones we are pointed to the 1980s, but the décor, props and costumes imply otherwise. The room has a 1970s appearance, whereas Bert’s costume – cap and braces – could be dated to the 1940s. Also, in contrast to Rose’s loose-fitting dress, cardigan and slippers – familiar outfit for an elderly lady – Bert appears to be dressed for work, creating further discrepancy. My companion at first thought Bert was Rose’s son rather than husband, and the cast revealed during the Q&A that they did consider making Bert Rose’s carer – showing just how open the play is to varying interpretations, evidencing Pinter’s genius in having created a ‘blank canvas furnished with superb dialogue’, as one actor put it, highlighting the benefits of open-ended works not only in sparking a storyteller’s imagination but also, as in this case, in allowing a work to become a vehicle for exploring social issues.
All the actors could be praised for their performances, each bringing their own distinct energy to their roles, but the star of the show was Lucy. She depicted old age perfectly, eliciting sympathy throughout: her facial expressions – downturned mouth, vacant-surprised stare, nervous energy – and movements – shaky, disorientated, clumsy – were spot-on. In contrast, despite his silence and apparent boredom, Bert possessed the movements of a young man, made particularly evident at the end of the play when he takes Rose in a violent, sexual embrace. In addition, neither of the actors wore make-up or wigs to suggest old age, making Lucy’s performance particularity impressive, though the suggestion of their youth increasingly bleeds into the play – an effect we later learned to have been deliberate in order to represent the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s, whereby the sufferer’s sense of self is disrupted by short-term memory loss causing a reversion to the past.
Rose demands the audience’s attention from the beginning, though as her nervous prattle becomes repetitive our attention turns to the unrelentingly silent Burt, reluctantly eating his over-cooked breakfast and under-brewed tea, as we try to discern why he remains silent and perceive his rising agitation through frequent despairing glances and frowns. Is this a simple case of a loveless marriage? Does he despise her? These conclusions lose certainty in light of glimmers of tenderness in Bert’s eyes – played with brilliant subtly by Ethan Martin – suggesting he’s longing for another version of Rose.
From the moment the first supporting character enters the room – Mr Kidd – Rose’s cheerfulness and Bert’s stoic silence grow increasingly strained and pained, to the audience’s rapt attention, culminating in Bert snapping a pencil in frustration. This was a little anticlimactic, though Bert’s return to the stage in the final scene gives more satisfying expression his suppressed rage. The violent climax of the play is well realised. The blind man, Riley (Kash Arshad), enters the scene from behind the audience. Shivers ran down my spine as I heard the sound of his cane tapping on the floor as he made his way, painfully slowly, to the stage, brushing past audience members in the tight space.
Though blind, Riley, as with all the other characters, comments on the room – as if in doing so, part of the room is taken from Rose. This is also suggested by the fact that all the characters invade Rose’s personal space in one way or another, frequently touching her face and arms. The Just Talk team have ensured every gesture contributes to expressing the characters’ underlying emotions and the lack of control caused by her disease. The sense of ambiguity regarding Rose’s age is also reaffirmed during this scene, heightened by her letting her hair down, and the entrance of Bert who takes her away from Riley in a passionate embrace. Finally Bert speaks, and though lacking enunciation at first (perhaps due to spending most of the play in silence), Ethan Martin gives a thrilling performance in this scene. The audience held its breath, but as Bert exited the stage and the lights went off, there was no expulsion. With Rose’s final desperate cry, ‘I can’t see’ , the audience remained in the dark with her.
Though the play was thrilling enough on its own, even with the unanswered questions and multiple interpretations, I would recommend staying on for the Q&A and learning about the imaginative yet reasoned backstories devised by the team. Kezi Gardom has truly done an excellent job in realising their interpretation of the play. Though arguably robbing the play of its absurdity by giving cause to the confusion – Rose’s dementia – this is an inspiring piece of theatre.
Emma Rhys