The 4th of February. Opening night. I entered the O’Reilly Theatre to a set draped in white. Floor, sofa, table, bed: all covered like a blank canvas. A pulsating rhythm in the background. Bizarre projections of a hand wading through a sink on the back wall. There was a palpable nervousness in the air.
Yet as I settled into my seat, I was immediately struck by the nonchalance of Georgina Cotes. Her green sweater starkly contrasted with the sterile whiteness of the scene. Unfazed by the nervy atmosphere, Cotes sat easily in her chair, smoking a cigarette as she flicked through a magazine. It was as if all of this were routine to her. Moments before the play had started, she had already slipped into her role of the middle-class wife – or perhaps the role had slipped into her. Already, I could notice the contrasts between the mundane and the surreal, the domestic and the bizarre, that underpin Raphael da Silva’s take on Harold Pinter’s The Lover.
This one-act play is a tale of two worlds. We open with a quotidian world of middle-class domesticity: Cotes sees off her breadwinning husband, played by George Loynes, as he sets off for another day at the office. But then he asks, rather matter-of-factly: “Is your lover coming today?” This introduces the second, more dynamic world of the play: that of erotic fantasy and intense sexual yearning. Each world, and each man, is framed upon the other, and acknowledges the other’s presence – but ultimately, mornings and evenings are the husband’s time. Daytime is for the Lover.
We are led to believe that the wife is having an affair, only for it to be soon revealed that the titular Lover, “Max”, is really just her husband in role-play. But Moribayassa’s Loynes and Cotes embody the roles required by the two worlds so convincingly that you’d believe that they were two completely different pairs of actors. This is achieved, in part, through costume changes: Loynes trades his business suit for a 2000s-inspired, pop-punk outfit when acting as the Lover, while Cotes dons a revealing black dress.
But costumes are simply outer symbols of the ultimate difference between the pairs: the changing relationship between the characters. Complex layers of intimacy unravel throughout the scenes. Where husband and wife appear quite distant in the opening of the play – sat at opposite ends of the room, dialogue filled with long and laboured pauses – their daytime sexual roleplay re-invigorates the relationship. Their movements become more dynamic, more intimate – at one point, a tense game of cat-and-mouse ensues as “Max” chases the wife around the room.
I was particularly struck by the use of a bongo to stage this newfound intimacy. As a spotlight briefly narrows our focus, we become hyper-attentive to Loynes and Cotes’s hand movements, as the two inch towards each other on the skin of the drum. The scene was as captivating as it was unnerving, as a sense of threat grew with Loynes’s increasingly aggressive beating of the drum. Menace is the undertone of many a Pinter play, and it is a testament to da Silva’s creativity that he has drawn it out so effectively with just a single prop.
The dynamic between Cotes and Loynes is undeniably the driving force of The Lover. They wonderfully complement each other. The Daily Info describes Loynes as “21-year-old David Tennant”, and I’d argue that this assessment holds in this play too. He slots perfectly into the role of the patronising husband as he grows weary of roleplay, exhibiting all the measured anger of the Tenth Doctor. Loynes hits all Pinter’s beats of wry, black humour – particularly noteworthy was him eloquently correcting his wife that he does not have a “mistress”, but a “common or garden slut.” He meets his match in Cotes. I was taken by her ability to draw out the different layers of the wife’s emotions through facial expressions alone: she moves from profoundly exhilarated by the fantasy to thoroughly frustrated and exhausted when she sees it come to an end. Cotes beautifully displays the vulnerabilities of the character – it was difficult not to feel moved by her sheer desperation at the climax of the play.
Undressing was a dominant motif in da Silva’s take on the play. The Lover’s core endeavour is tracing the wife’s attempts at symbolically “undressing” her husband, using their forays into sexual fantasy to draw out a raw, erotic experience from under the surface of their day-to-day, mundane lives. To echo this theme more overtly, the actors changed in and out of various outfits on stage in the transitions between scenes. Accompanying such transitions were profoundly disturbing visuals of slime and tentacles, set to throbbing and bizarre rhythms. Whilst they could feel a little laboured at times, and the projections a little repetitive, perhaps this was precisely the point, creating an awkward, uncomfortable sense of lingering as the two worlds bled into each another.
Staging Pinter always comes with its fair share of challenges, but da Silva has proven himself to be more than capable of tackling them. He has done a fantastic job at exploring the darker undertones of sexual roleplay. The play moves through a kaleidoscope of emotions, from unnerving, dark, comic, and finally, somewhat tragic. Da Silva should be proud of his profoundly creative interpretation of The Lover.
[The Lover, a production by Moribayassa, is running at The Keble O’Reilly, 4th-8th Feb 2025]