Celebration

The Gate Theatre, runs until Sunday.

Two celebrations are taking place in an awfully posh London restaurant that seems to offer graceful if dubious service. One party is in boorish full swing, the other barely wobbling. Lambert (Nick Dunning) and Julie (Ingrid Craigie) have come to mark their wedding anniversary, with his brother Matt (Lorcan Cranitch) and her sister, Prue (Barbara Brennan), who are also married. Next to them a banker and his young wife (Andrew Whipp and Jade Yourell) toast his promotion with all the jubilation of a court hearing. The parties eventually come together and power games ensue.

This was Harold Pinter’s final play, first performed in 2000, and as such you are inclined to read deeply into it. Oddly for Pinter, though, the play seems to resist too much scrutiny. Its restless comedy, full of absurdity, may routinely undermine reality, yet it doesn’t inspire his trademark laughter of menace.

Characters here hold no major secrets. Dunning and Cranitch’s affluent wide boys and Whipp’s hollow banker are undermined and mocked by their words. “I haven’t got any character either,” Yourell’s Suki tells Whipp’s Russell, and it’s unclear whether that counts as a playwright’s dismissal or an admission. Are they worrying symbols of cultural erosion, or simply stick figures?

Wayne Jordan’s elegant, funny and intriguing staging ensures that we never give up on them, though. His accomplished cast let us find the echoes of Pinter’s oeuvre – warring brothers, gendered power play, memory games and occasions that are never what they seem – while exposing civilisation as a thin veneer over something more vicious. That cover might be yanked away at any time, like a tablecloth trick.

Dunning is marvellously aggressive as a self-described “strategy consultant” (a job description that might have suited the Kray brothers), but Craigie and Brennan wage battles in words that are just as brutal. “I’d like to kiss you on the mouth,” Brennan tells Bryan Murray’s restaurateur, Richard, as though she intends to sock him on the jaw.

The staff, though, maintain composure and control (Murray keeps that jaw inclined at roughly a 45-degree angle, an appropriately collected and mildly surreal pose). They spill memories that disarm or destabilise, like Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s mysterious mâitresse d’hôtel or the more routine interjections of a waiter, played with wry geniality by Nigel Harman.

You can take Harman’s outlandish anecdotes about his grandfather as pure comedy which comes apropos of absolute balderdash (“I heard you talking about TS Eliot a little bit earlier . . .”). But he nudges the restaurant towards a bigger metaphor. A womb, he calls it, which he would rather never leave; still standing in the mystery of life that his grandfather got out of.

Jordan’s production is right to take its comedy seriously: Pinter may have been having fun, but his theatre is built on fascinating interruptions – right up to his last words.