A Pinter Portmanteau
Posted on 13th November 2026
Although billed as The Lover, Open Space’s latest production is a selection of Harold Pinter’s shorter work. First up was The Lover, a witty comedy of manners, with a conceit that slowly creeps up on the audience, as the penny finally drops and you realise what’s going on. Mia Chadwick and Mike Davison were both excellent as the playful married couple with a trick up their sleeves. Chadwick’s spiky performance as Sarah and Davison’s cruelly manipulative Richard man did much to counteract Pinter’s notorious misogynistic leanings. Funny, nuanced and performed with a lightness of touch, it was the highlight of the evening.
Written in the 50s as part of comedy revues, Request Stop and Applicant are perhaps best appreciated by Pinter completists. Claire Heard had a fine old time channelling the likes of Hilda Baker, but the sketch hasn’t aged well. Mitchell Pocock had more to work with as the Applicant, risking injury from pratfalls to squeeze laughs from an absurdist setup. Nice flashing headgear, though.
Originally intended for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Landscape ended up on radio after Pinter refused to cut the F-word and the Lord Chamberlain refused to grant a licence. Tucked away uncut on the BBC Third Programme, it surely trumped Kenneth Tynan’s celebrated outburst a few years earlier. The language has long since lost the power to shock, but the play itself is still strikingly unconventional. On the night, I wondered whether Yves Green’s melancholic, elegiac performance was at odds with Frank Boyd’s prosaic, conversational style, and whether to take issue with David Green’s direction. But this would have done him a great injustice, as the mismatch is all there in the text, the pair delivering perfectly what Pinter demanded. Their Beckettian dual monologues supposedly illustrated emotional isolation and an inability to communicate. Maybe so, but that isn’t the same as compelling drama, and I found myself unable to engage with the play. Still, it’s Pinter’s card I’m marking, not Green and Boyd’s, who were pretty much note perfect.
In a way, this was a classic Open Space evening. The company never avoids a challenge and often challenges their audience. There’s always a sense with this company that you, and the work, are in safe hands. I may not have embraced all that was offered, but all of it was at least an education, all of the leads performed faultlessly, and much of it was very entertaining. You can’t really ask for more than that.