Less than zero

NEAR the start of The Collection, the first play in the Gate's new Harold Pinter festival, there is an exchange between two characters that sums up Pinter's work as a whole. Two men are in a living room - neither has met the other before. Each can judge the other only by what they say right now, from moment to moment. One, James, remarks that the other, Bill, is not bad looking. Bill replies: "That's more than I can say for you." And James, in turn, replies: "I'm not interested in what you can say for me."

This is what most of Pinter's plays are like. People appear before us without warning. We know nothing about them except what they say from moment to moment. And they are not interested in what anyone can say for them, they decline to do what characters in the theatre usually do for the audience - fill in the gaps in our knowledge, impart information construct a story. Most plays begin from the point of view of the audience, with a total ignorance that is gradually reduced. Pinter's begin with a total ignorance that is gradually increased. Instead of moving towards knowledge, we move towards mystery.

It shouldn't work, but it does because Pinter's genius is to construct his plays as if they were of the familiar sort, as if all the familiar rules still applied. The outward farm of naturalistic theatre is maintained, even though its inner core - cause and effect - has been removed.

Watching a play like The Collection is like that moment in mathematics class in school when the teacher introduces the idea that numbers can be minus as well as plus. It seems at first like a ridiculous notion - how can anything be less than zero? - but because this absurdity follows all the same rules, you learn to accept it. Pinter's plays work the same way starting with zero and working down. But because they do so with perfect logical precision, you find as a member of the audience, that they have shape and coherence.

The Collection looks like the kind of play we know. It has furniture and carpets and food, CD players and Chinese vases. The characters eater, exit, and perform their lines. But the source of our unease is that they are performing not for us but for each other. They are inventing, not just stones, but selves. They have no off stage lives. They are nothing more than what they say and do on stage. They have no interest in convincing us of their reality.

In Harold Pinter's language the verbs are lies and the nouns are mysteries. The words for actions - I am feel I love - are usually descriptions not of what the characters are doing but of what they have chosen to say. And the words for things - the room the bed, the bath towel - point not to solid realities but to deep uncertainties.

In the case of The Collection, the important actions - an adulterous encounter in a Leeds hotel - may just be words, just a notion that the characters invent or deny, to amuse or torment themselves with. The important things the room they entered, the bed they lay on, the bath towel he draped around himself -bare just figures of speech.

Inevitably, one of the fascinations of The Collection was to watch Pinter himself playing the role of Harry and to see the sense of containment in his acting. Harry is the oldest of the four characters, the dominant presence. Bill, the putative partner in Stella's adultery, is his partner and protege in the fashion business. Harry is required to oscillate between calm civility and violent rage, between polite banality and surreal invention. And instead of attempting to create a character in which all of these contradictions could be reconciled, Pinter did the opposite. He presented Harry as a vessel into which the various emotions could be poured and out of which they could as suddenly be emptied.

It was a telling demonstration of the way in which Pinter plays work, and the keynote it sounded resounded through the rest of Alan Stanford's admirable production. Gerard McSorley as the aggrieved husband, James, Ingrid Craigie as the wife, Stella, and especially Frank McCusker as the lover, Bill, all managed to match Pinter's own containment without ever becoming merely flat.

THE play demands that actors have the sureness of foot to keep their balance amidst ambulances. They need to be playful, to enjoy the game that is being played even as they do justice to the sinister and savage undertones that are always present. And they need to raise questions about the sexuality of the characters - are Bill and Harry lovers are James and Bill attracted to each other? - without answering them.

All the actors kept their poise superbly, helped considerably by the success of Frank Hallinan Flood's design in effectively reducing the three playing areas called for by the piece to two. That deftness, together with Alan Burrett's extraordinarily rich lighting, allowed the action to move with the kind of continuous, hypnotic rhythm that is essential to Pinter. If the rest of the festival maintains such high standards, the spell will be unbroken.