Pinter Five / Pinter Six
Harold Pinter Theatre, London

Sweat
Donmar Warehouse, London

The latest productions in the six-month festival of the shorter plays of the most significant British dramatist of the twentieth century, at the eponymous Harold Pinter Theatre, are Pinter Five and Pinter Six. As in the first four anthologies, the pleasures are starry actors – the latest are Jane Horrocks, Rupert Graves, John Simm and Celia Imrie – and lesser-known works being revealed as among Pinter’s best.

Victoria Station (1982), in which a cab company controller attempts to give a job to the dangerously uncommunicative Driver 274, packs into its compact length, comedy, a crime thriller and even theology: the alarmed dispatcher compares himself to both God and a monk.

Pinter Six cleverly pairs two nine-character plays set at evenings of excess among the successful: Party Time (1991) and Celebration (2000). These plays seemed to me at their premieres to be lesser Pinter, but it turns out that either they or I have matured.