UK Theatre Network

One For The Road & Victoria Station

by Harold Pinter

The Print Room 13 Sept – 1 Oct

Young Vic 6 – 15 October

Nestled off a quiet, unassuming street in Notting Hill, in what resembles someone's back garden, is The Print Room. An exciting new theatre space which opened its doors in September 2010, after being converted from a fifties warehouse, which housed a Printer's workshop. An apt coincidence then, that they should be performing Pinter at a Printers.

This double bill of Pinter's Victoria Station & One For The Road provides a great opportunity to see two of his lesser known short plays, which feature his trademark themes of menace, oppression and absurd power politics. Victoria Station is an existential crises of a two hander, where Minicab controller, Keith Dunphy despairingly attempts to direct bemused taxi driver, Kevin Doyle to pick up a passenger from Victoria Station. The only problem is that the driver doesn't know where Victoria is, let alone what a station is. Dunphy's lamp lit face, is a boiling image of rage as he vents his spleen, pleading into the radio with a strong Irish accent, “247, 247, can you just go to Victoria Station.” It is agonizing to watch his excruciating attempts at directing Doyle, who responds with nervous uncertainty. In the cold of the small hours and with the white noise of the radio, each man's loneliness is unbearably accentuated. Pinter evokes the essence of frustration by providing no suitable reasons or answers for why the driver is so perplexed, there is just terminal doubt, in a one sided conversation where each man's isolation is his only certainty.

The seamless transition between Victoria Station and One For The Road is so subtle, the harrowing subject matter takes you completely by surprise. Mischa Twitchin's fluorescent lighting design flickers on, cruelly illuminating both audience and actors alike, in a voyeuristic square of torture where there is no where to hide. The atmosphere is so oppressively sterile, director, Jeff James makes you feel as though your own reactions are being observed. In a cunning power reversal, Kevin Doyle is Nicolas, a sadistic, monomaniac, who believes he is the voice of God. Interrogating both Victor (Keith Dunphy) and the rest of his family separately, Doyle portrays a frighteningly disturbing character who switches between chummy pal and unrelenting persecutor with consummate ease. His first testament style justice and unpredictable nature make him all the more threatening as he skilfully deploys Pinter's pregnant pauses like needles under the nails. Dunphy's Victor is a shivering wreck of a man, unable to stand and covered in scars, he can hardly utter a single word as the squeak of Nicholas's Whisky cap, tightens the tension. Tortured and imprisoned in a separate room, Gila, played by Anna Hewson is distressingly believable as his ravaged wife, who suffers Doyle's relentless irrational questions. The presence of Nicky, their son (Thomas Capodici or Rory Frazer) is particularly worrying, whose apparent carefree nature is in stark contrast with his parents extreme torment. Pinter exposes us to a savage representation of torture and oppression, where human rights have no sanctity. This is a seriously disturbing play which feels perhaps a little too gratuitous, one is left totally shocked by the chilling scenes of psychological torture but it is hard to understand how this is a critique of political power and not a slight exploitation of an extremely sensitive subject matter. We all know torture is horrific, but is it not more interesting to examine why we consider it wrong, rather than simply intimidate the audience?

With such a high calibre cast, excellent direction and innovative design, it is definitely worth trying to catch One For The Road and Victoria Station at The Print Room, or when it transfers to the Young Vic in October. If you're bored of feeling relaxed and cheerful, go and see these two plays and relieve yourself with some serious anxiety and sobering depression. 

René Auberjonois had been a busy actor on stage and screen for thirty years before he played Odo, the shape-shifting constable on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993-99). In 2004 he took the role of venerable lawyer Paul Lewiston on the acclaimed legal drama Boston Legal. Lately, he has appeared in Warehouse 13 and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and has participated in an audio recording of the Bible.

Auberjonois attended Carnegie-Mellon University where he studied theatre in-depth, learning not only about acting but about the entire process of producing a play. After college, he acted with various theatre companies, starting at the prestigious Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. He helped found the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music Repertory Company in New York. Eventually, Auberjonois landed a role on Broadway in 1968, alternating between the Fool to Lee J. Cobb's King Lear (the longest running production of the play in Broadway history) and Ned in A Cry of Players (opposite Frank Langella), directly followed by Marco in Fire!. The next year, he won a Tony Award for his performance as Sebastian Baye alongside Katharine Hepburn in Coco. Other Tony nominations were for Neil Simon's The Good Doctor (1973, opposite Christopher Plummer); as The Duke in Big River (1984), winning a Drama Desk Award; and, memorably, as Buddy Fidler/Irwin S. Irving in City of Angels (1989), written by Larry Gelbart and Cy Coleman. Other Broadway appearances include Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1972); Mr. Samsa in Steven Berkoff’s Metamorphosis opposite Mikhail Baryshnikov (1989); Professor Abronsius in Dance of the Vampires, and Jethro Crouch in Sly Fox (2004, for which he was nominated for an Outer Critics Circle Award). As a member of the Second Drama Quartet, Auberjonois toured with Ed Asner, Dianne Wiest, and Harris Yulin. He also appeared in the Tom Stoppard and Andre Previn work, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, at the Kennedy Center and the Metropolitan Opera and played the titular character in Molière's The Imaginary Invalid at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. in 2008. Auberjonois has also directed many theatrical productions.


Photo by Suzanne Vanweddigen

CK: Are you going to do another play in the near future?
RA: If I do another play, one possibility is L’Avare - The Miser.
CK: Ah, yes! You said you might want to do that.
RA: Yes. So we’ll have to see if we can make it happen. It’s a tough play. We just were in Paris and we saw the Comédie Française, their production of it, which was extraordinary in some ways and very wrong-headed in other ways. I suppose the problem with doing a classic that is so well known, to find a new way of telling it, sometimes people kind of push it out of shape. The hard thing is it’s very easy to say that The Miser should be dark. Molière had darkness in him but he was basically a comedian and he had to deliver the laughs. He was like Neil Simon. And so to deny that clowning is to counteract the work, I think.
CK: Right, I completely agree. You said you might want to do King Lear some time.
RA: No, I didn’t. You never heard me say that.
CK: Oh yes, I read it in an interview.
RA: If you read it in an interview, how do you know it’s true?CK: Well, that’s true. (Laughs) So, you don’t want to do it?
RA: No, it’s not that I don’t want to do it. It’s that I did it, you know. I played Lear when I was very young and of course I couldn’t possibly achieve it, but it was a tremendous challenge and it taught me a tremendous amount. That was at ACT. And then I went on to New York City, to Lincoln Center, and I played the Fool in the play with Lee J. Cobb…and then a few years later, I played Edgar with James Earl Jones as Lear, that was the one that Raul Julia was in. So I’ve done the three best parts in the play. And I’m not sure what I have to offer the part. It would have to be a wonderful director who wanted to do it. I wouldn’t want to do it just so that I may say the lines, and slog through a mediocre production. And you know, my friend Stacy Keach did a wonderful production very recently, and I went to see my friend Robert Foxworth just a month and half, two months ago in San Diego playing Lear, and I saw Dakin Matthews playing Lear. So I’ve seen a lot of Lears recently, and they all had brilliant parts. But it is like Everest. It is a mountain that will defeat you ultimately. So you know you’ll just have to be humble in the face of it. You need a great director. I had a great director in Ed Sherrin in the production in Shakespeare in the Park with James Earl Jones. It’s on video.
CK: Yes, usually theatre productions are so boring when you watch them on video but this one is very exciting.
RA: I can’t watch it because I know that the real experience was so much more. You know, it was pretty powerful.
CK: I hope you’ll do something in London, too.
RA: I know, you keep saying that.
(Laughter)
CK: Tell me, what are some of the dramatists you appreciate?
RA: Beckett—who I suspect perhaps actors enjoy performing and the audience sometimes less watching it. Sometimes it can be a difficult experience. Beckett is wonderful. Chekhov, which I’ve got to do very little of, really, but I feel an affinity, as if the little bit of Chekhov that I did, that I have done, has had a real influence on me as an actor. When I think of any play and any character…because what Chekhov was so brilliant at is defining his characters: how intricate they can be, their foibles, weaknesses, arrogance, all things that he saw in people, shimmering like water. That’s a wonderful thing, if you can achieve that as an actor. Also showing a lot of different facets of a character. Beckett and Chekhov, and Pinter, who I’ve also done very little of, then Shakespeare. I would love to do David Mamet, but I am the kind of actor that he would think: “Oh no, he can’t do my plays.”
CK: Why would that matter?
RA: Living playwrights have casting approval. When I first played Tartuffe, I got to play Tartuffe because Richard Wilbur, whose translation we were using—it was a revival of a production that the director had directed a year or so before—Richard Wilbur would only give them the rights to the play if the actor who played Tartuffe in the first production didn’t. And that was why I was cast. The actor who he wouldn’t let play it was a brilliant actor but a very eccentric, quirky kind of actor and I think Richard Wilbur felt he distorted his work…but he was a wonderful actor. So what I’m saying is: I can’t imagine Mamet casting me in a new play for him, to have just written that play and say, “Oh, maybe that guy could play this part!” I don’t think he would ever do that. 
CK: In Germany, we have a different kind of theatre. You probably know post-dramatic theatre where the director is really the creative force and the writer is almost unimportant.
RA: Like movies?
CK: No, it’s like the death of the character. There are no real characters, the actors just say lines but they are not a character. They might express a certain mood, maybe, but it’s like Richard Wilson or, I don’t know if you know Elfriede Jelinek, she won the Nobel Prize, she is a good example. We have a lot of this kind of theatre in Germany. Would you be interested in doing anything like that if it ever was offered to you?
RA: Oh, I don’t know what exactly…I’m not clear on what it is, but I’m always interested. Do you know the work of Steven Berkoff by any chance?
CK: Yes!
RA: Well, I did Metamorphosis on Broadway with Mikhail Baryshnikov and I loved doing that. Now he’s not everybody’s cup of tea, you know. Some people just hate Steven Berkoff. One of my friends came to see me rehearsing it and saw a run through and she said, “How are you doing this?” because it was all so articulated, and timed and lines coming out in a certain way. We were the family of Gregor Samsa … And when we were eating it had to be a certain way. When we were saying the lines—dom, dom dom….you know.
CK: That goes in that direction, yes.
RA: I loved doing it. I just loved it. Once you learn it, it’s like a dance. Once you learn it, the steps, then you forget it, you just dance. There’s such a foundation. It’s not improvising. Improvising can be wonderful, but it can feel dangerous because you can lose it and not be interesting. But dancing like that and having rigid form that you then forget that you’ve done all that work and you just….
CK: There is a really exciting play—Every Good Boy Deserves Favour—which is shared by an orchestra and actors.
RA: You know that I did that.
CK: Yes, I do! I just saw it in the National Theatre. I thought it was so great. I never saw it before, I had only a record of it.
RA: Ah, with John Wood, right…John Wood must have done the recording.
CK: It’s Ian Richardson and Patrick Stewart.
RA: Oh, really?
CK: Yes, and Ian McKellen.
RA: That’s interesting, because John Wood created the role the first time it was performed, and then I did it when they came to the Kennedy Center in Washington and John Wood moved over there and we went to the Metropolitan Opera in Los Angeles with the Los Angeles Philharmonic with our son Remy, he was playing the boy. It’s a wonderful piece. You know, for a while I thought, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it will never be done again. But now I think it’s time to keep it active. It would be fun to do it again.
CK: You could do it in London!
(Laughter)
RA: Yes...
CK: Michael Grandage said he was thinking of you. Now he is not going to take over the National Theatre, unfortunately….
RA: He isn’t?
CK: No, he says he now wants to concentrate on his creative work. He wants to direct but he could always say, “Well, I want to do this thing. Let’s ask René if he wants to be in it.”
RA: Ah, that’s nice.
CK: Thank you very much for your time.
RA: Thank you, Carolin. 

The Caretaker

Octagon Theatre, Bolton

6 March 2009

Departing Octagon director Mark Babych is giving Bolton audiences a brief opportunity to see Harold Pinter’s early drama The Caretaker.  This slightly surreal three-hander is a stage version of scissors-paper-stone, as a trio of oddly-assorted characters vie for supremacy in a seedy bedsit.

The story, such as it is, begins when social misfit Aston invites a tramp, Davies, to share a squalid room in his brother’s derelict house.  At first Davies is all gratitude, and Aston contemplates turning the temporary stay into permanent tenure, offering his guest the position of caretaker.  However the atmosphere soon turns sour – and not just because of the tramp’s lack of personal hygiene - when Aston’s brother Mick turns up and begins playing his tenants off against each other. 

RSC veteran Paul Webster is superb as the revolting itinerant Davies.  There have been younger, more vigorous interpretations of this role where the tramp becomes as physically dangerous as Mick, but here his frailty explains why he needs to insinuate himself so carefully with the older brother.  There are moments of real comedy too – when Aston brings Davies some second-hand shoes the old man sticks his nose deep inside them and relishes their odour like a connoisseur savouring the complex bouquet of a vintage burgundy.  And his self-delusion is all too clear when he proudly struts around in a scarlet smoking jacket worn incongruously over a pair of dirty long-johns.

Jeff Hordley is the semi-psychopathic Mick, all leather-jacket, drainpipes and winkle-pickers.  This is a 360^o portrayal of a disturbing and sadistic character - even when he’s terrorising Davies you can detect the twinkle of enjoyment in his eye.

However the real stand-out performance comes from Matthew Rixon as Aston.  The Octagon’s costume department has done a fine job of establishing him as a Brylcreemed, jacket-and-tie-wearing archetype of Fifties respectability, so he seems not to belong to Pinter’s world at all but to come from a completely different fictional landscape – perhaps something by Barbara Pym or Iris Murdoch. 

It’s the actor himself though who creates a vulnerable and apparently placid character who has depth and stillness at the centre of his being.  Aston’s repeated actions, whether dressing or undressing or rolling a cigarette, are slow, deliberate and occasionally bemusing but always compelling to watch.  And the long monologue describing a traumatic incident in his earlier life, subtly emphasised by Brent Lees’s delicate lighting, is a drama in itself.

Richard Foxton’s thrust stage design is the ideal way to draw an audience into the play’s sordid atmosphere.  Aston’s clutter invades the whole playing area instead of being stuck at the back of a proscenium arch.  The front of the stage is piled with broken chairs, battered suitcases and piles of yellowing newspapers, and the attention to detail extends as far as the clouds of dust beaten from an old blanket.

This is an excellent production of a modern classic with exemplary acting all round, but hurry up and book because you only have three weeks to catch it.

The Caretaker is on at Bolton Octagon until Saturday 28 March 2009

Tickets: from £9.00

Evenings: Mon-Sat at 7.30pm

Matinees: Wednesday 18 March and Saturday 28 March @ 2pm

Box Office: 01204 520661

www.octagonbolton.co.uk