Two of Harold Pinter’s less well-known plays, The Lover and Ashes to Ashes, are presented as an imaginatively conceived double-bill at the Corpus Playrooms this week. Although they are distinctly different plays in tone and subject matter, and were written several decades apart, both are about the relationship between couples who live together, and therefore offer surprising cross-references.

This production, however, disappoints – it fails to consider either couple beneath their outward surfaces.  The nuances and richness of Pinter’s diction is glossed over. Subtext is presented as if a binary: she says x but actually means y. It is as if almost everything that the characters say has been taken at face value, with no scrutiny or challenging of what or why these characters might be saying what they do.

The Lover starts the evening, and of the two plays, is the more successfully realised. Richard (Charlie Parham) and Sarah (Celine Lowenthal) isolate sexuality from their marriage:  she has a lover, whom she tells her husband, comes round in the afternoons while he is at work. Director Ceci Mourkogiannis imaginatively presents this couple in a clinical environment - Sarah’s dress even complements the colour of her cleaning gloves. And the scene in which we first encounter Sarah with ‘Max’ is spot-on – with her crimson shoes, table cloth, and lighting transforming the sterile home. Further to the credit of the staging, the scene transitions’ pounding, rhythmic music succeeds in minimising the episodic nature of a script that was originally written for television.

It is difficult for a reviewer to criticise this production without giving away the twist in the narrative – but the main issue with Mourkogiannis’ staging is that she does not allow the characters’ masks to ever slip. That is to say that the front they present, the persona they each assume in this play is too rigid. What Pinter presents in The Lover is the crisis of a relationship in which the couples’ game, their arrangement, begins to cease working. Yet we don’t get to see enough of that breakdown in this performance.

Worst of all, the plot twist that I avoid mentioning here, is fundamentally undermined by Mourkogiannis’ decision for the other minor character, John the milkman, to be also played by Lowenthal, radically altering the whole meaning of the play; an unbelievably misjudged flaw.

After a short interval, Ashes to Ashes follows, in which Parham goes on to play Devlin, opposite Emma Hall’s Rebecca. It does seem a missed opportunity that the dual casting of Parham across the two plays is not also mirrored in unitary casting of the female characters – such casting would heighten the contrasts between the different couples of the two plays.

The set-up is this: Rebecca lives with Devlin, but apart from this apparent fact, the status of their relationship is unclear. The action begins with Devlin questioning Rebecca about a previous lover of hers – but she seems unwilling to describe him in any detail, so Devlin keeps pressing her for answers. Ashes to Ashes has the potential to be a deeply uncomfortable and disturbing experience; the audience watching it on the night I saw it seemed merely perplexed.

It doesn’t help that the dialogue is delivered too quickly, not giving the audience time to consider what the actors are saying. More fundamentally, however, both characters are performed as internally static – there is no progression in this production from the start to the end. Parham begins too sinister and Hall too defiant; an atmosphere of superficial menace pervades the staging. Rather, Devlin should become increasingly more like an interrogator, not begin as one; Rebecca should be more evasive and reluctant at first.

In her assured, seemingly calm state, Hall is not convincing as someone who has experienced a deeply upsetting event - even though we are supposed to question the veracity of what she tells Devlin, it is clear that she is indeed a victim of some sort of trauma.  Deservedly then, Ashes to Ashes was greeted with hoots of laughter at highly inappropriate places.

The ending, like John the milkman’s (non-) appearance, is weakened by a directorial ‘innovation’. In all: a disappointing evening.