One for the Road
If proof were needed that
torture, and the capacity to torture, is both inhuman and all too human at the same time, the
half hour of Harold Pinter’s One
for the Road does the job. Revived at the Print Room (before its Young Vic run) in a double
bill with Pinter’s black comedy Victoria
Station, the play predates Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo by years.
However, Alex Lowde’s anonymous set might be anywhere. If Kevin Doyle’s interrogator Nicolas were to offer Keith Dunphy’s Victor a whisky to match the one he keeps refilling
for himself, this could be his living room. Nicolas is, in his own words, “the chatty type”, his verbal torture dependent on exploiting Victor’s fears (and ours too) of what might be happening to
his wife and son elsewhere in the building. Even when he brings them in, much is left to the imagination.
Director Jeff James studiously
avoids pantomime, coaxing an astonishingly persuasive performance from Doyle as Nicolas
rehearses the kind of religious and patriotic sentiments now eerily familiar from
post 9/11 rhetoric. Meanwhile Dunphy’s Victor is almost too painful to look at,
a man shattered (in every sense) by questions whose answers have already been
decided for him.
In Victoria Station,
which runs directly into the second play, their roles are reversed: Dunphy plays a wired London cab
controller, Doyle his seemingly distracted (or demented?) driver. If James and his cast
don’t quite nail the rhythms of this shorter piece – some of the best lines are swallowed – it still sheds light on One for the Road.
Both are games of terror in which the real threat is out of sight. But by asking us to imagine it for ourselves, Pinter forces us into the back seat and driving seat at the same time. It’s a supremely discomforting ride.
