Theatre of Menace – Smock Alley – 20 + 21 May | 8pm | Boys School

Purple Coat Productions

– A Kind of Alaska, Celebration, Victoria Station, Mountain Language and extracts from The Caretaker and The Homecoming

This is a collection of four short plays by Harold Pinter, along with a number of extracts from The Caretaker and The Homecoming. A Kind of Alaska tells the story of a woman waking up after many years in a coma and trying to accept how much the world around her has altered. Mountain Language is a ‘parable about torture and the fate of the Kurdish people’ using a totalitarian regime who run a country with cruelty and violence. The Homecoming gives us a brief segment of the text where a young man and his new wife arrive through the door of the house in which he grew up. Victoria Station is a dialogue between a taxi driver and his dispatcher, as he tries to get the dim witted driver to pick up a customer from Victoria Station. There are also two extracts from the Caretaker; monologues from different characters as they explain a brief piece of their history.

Purple Coat are a Liverpool based theatre company. This is not their first trip to Smock Alley as they have recently performed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night. They will also return to Dublin later this year with a version of King Lear, again in Smock Alley. This new work is a collection of rarely seen Pinter short plays and is performed with a cast of young actors and a minimal set. They have made a number of alterations to the text to suit the age and sex of the actors performing them. The length of the coma in A Kind of Alaska has been reduced form 30 to 10 year, allowing the main character to be in her mid twenties. Also, a number of male parts have been substituted for female, which change the context slightly.

Pinter’s early works were described as a ‘comedy of menace’ by critics and this is no doubt where this production got its name from. Each piece was introduced by a projection onto the back wall of the set, also giving the year to allow the viewer to get some context for the work.

The short pieces varied in quality, and there were a number of technical issues, such as the lighting, that did not work well on the night. As this was only the first night of the performance, no doubt this would have been ironed out over time, or with a couple of preview nights. With the full cast in their mid twenties other than one member, it did alter the context of the work, but the quality of the text was always obvious. The hilarious version of Victoria Station was probably the highlight of the night, along with two extracts from the Caretaker that worked well.