A Kind of Alaska

Synopsis

1982 play about a woman emerging from sleeping sickness. Deborah was a pert, lively 16 year-old and part of a close-knit family when her body froze into a state of immobility. Twenty-nine years later, watched over throughout by the same doctor, she comes to life and gradually, poignantly, tries to adjust to the world around her.

Our Review:

31 March 2006

Literally a stone’s throw from his front door, the Gate in Notting Hill is Harold Pinter’s local. How fitting, then, that the pub theatre should raise a flag in honour of the playwright’s Nobel Prize, awarded last October as he reached the age of 75.

The citation declared that Pinter “restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue where people are at the mercy of each other.” This certainly applies to the double-bill of A Kind of Alaska (1982) and A Slight Ache (1958). The first is a dream-like awakening of a middle-aged woman, Deborah, after 29 years in a coma. She is attended by her doctor and her younger sister. In the second, a silent tramp displaces an elderly distracted writer in his own country house, encouraged by the writer’s wife.

As so often in Pinter, an emotional triangle is fraught with ambiguity and pain. When Niall Buggy’s enraptured doctor reveals that he married Deborah’...

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