The Lover/The Collection: David Morrissey shines and stumbles in Pinter’s tales of betrayal

While there’s a lot of gloom about regional theatre at the moment, it’s worth amplifying the fact that it’s booming business as usual at the Theatre Royal Bath, which has just unveiled its summer season.

In a sign of its creative clout as well as its commercial canniness, Ralph Fiennes is starring in a new David Hare play about Henry Irving, and will direct As You Like It (featuring Harriet Walter). Meanwhile, the third and final season curated by Deborah Warner in the studio concludes with a revival of Pinter’s The Birthday Party directed by Richard Jones – whose superlative account of Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal last year is transferring to the Old Vic.

There’s another fresh peek at Pinter before that. In the Ustinov, Lindsay Posner now mounts a pocket-sized staging of two playlets that were both first seen on TV in the early 1960s and helped make Pinter’s name. They’re theatrical to the core, though, and thematically co-relate, each floating marital jealousy, sexual fantasy and sophisticated ideas of betrayal.

In The Lover, David Morrissey initially appears as an upright, respectable businessman called Richard who cheerily heads off to the office in the fully declared knowledge that his wife – Claudie Blakley’s Sarah – will have her lover over that afternoon. He returns home to glean matter-of-factly how it all went, and reveals that he too has a woman on the side, dismissed as a mere “functionary”.

After this teasing foreplay comes the almost violent twist: Richard is himself the lover, adopting roles for kinky effect  – first a rough predatory type, then a dashing rescuer (absurdly, a park-keeper). It’s meticulously scripted, so that as they talk about the suburban marriage their mock-adultery is putatively spicing up, it’s clear how deep their dissatisfaction and, finally, mistrust runs. Just as Peter McKintosh’s set places chaise-longue and bourgeois trappings before a mirrored wall, so the contained dialogue houses a sense of reflected image superseding reality, the illusion making truth more elusive.

Morrissey nicely handles the light and shade of male certainty buckling with insecurity, and Blakley is more superb still: she excels at a blank, wide-eyed stare that can suggest an amused complicity but equally conveys a quality of tacit irony and lethal indifference.

The Lover emerged just after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Albee’s portrait of a couple trapped in their own back-biting and erotically charged in-house game. The Collection, by contrast, anticipates Joe Orton in the flip ambivalence of its sexual set-up. Mathew Horne’s James first squares up to the youth (Elliot Barnes-Worrell’s Bill) he believes had a fling with his wife (Stella, a purring Blakley, weirdly petting a white cat) in Leeds. He’s then seduced by his nonchalant rival, who’s living with the older, possessive Harry.

Horne is good at fraying uptightness but could usefully load more onto that arch dialogue (we lose, say, the sexual proclivity implicit in “I’m a bit of an opera fan myself”). Nor does Morrissey match the snappishly exact diction David Suchet lent the seedy Harry in the West End in 2018. It’s good to see him treading the boards again even so.

Until April 20. Tickets: 01225 448844; theatreroyal.org.uk