SMALL can, indeed, be beautiful. Running for less than an hour, languidly, tersely and enigmatically, the first play in the Gate's 1997 Pinter Festival is a lustrous theatrical pearl, exploring in small words; (albeit vested with potentially explosive emotions) an incident that may or may not have happened within a small group of apparently unimportant people.

Bill, a dress designer, lives with Harold, who says he discovered Bill in a slum. Stella, another dress designer, with a cute white kitten, is married to James. The action starts with Harold, arriving home at 4 a.m. from a party, answering an anonymous telephone caller looking for Bill. Later, James calls on Bill and accuses him of having slept with Stella at a dress show in Leeds. Did they, or did they not?

Their various conversations are, at most, elliptical. There are demonstrable lies and there may be truths. There are half-truths and contradictions, and most of the tones-of-voice betoken insincerities. But most of the conversational banalities, the civil and mannered exchanges, are loaded with sexual ambivalence and with emotional and maybe even physical threat.

It all makes for compelling drama which allows its audience to explore its own attitudes to sexuality and personal relationships - true, false or fantastical. When, near the end, Bill asserts that he will tell the truth, Harold's dramatically sound response is an angry "Oh, for God's sake, don't be ridiculous."

Alan Stanford has directed deftly and delicately so that the pauses are as potent as the spoken and the unspoken words. All the performances are exquisitely paced and consummately controlled. Frank McCusker provides a playful, and utterly untrustworthy Bill (the most elaborate and intriguing performance of the night). Harold Pinter offers the most straightforwardly assured characterisation of Harold as a suave bully. Gerard McSorley's James is equally assured without ever concealing his inner inability to tell what is the truth of the situation, and Ingrid Craigie's Stella remains consistently faithful in all respects to what may be the truth, or a lie, or a fantasy.

Frank Hallinan Flood's setting of two apartments in one space is exactly right for both mood and content, and the action is near perfectly lit by Alan Burrett.

If there are seats left for the remaining eight performances, seek them out forthwith.