The Lover and The Collection

A major revival of a double bill of Harold Pinter's plays - The Lover and The Colection - in London starring Richard Coyle, Charlie Cox, Gina McKee and Timothy West.

"Sharply comic" The Guardian

Hidden truths are revealed and sexual power games exposed in these two funny, dark and deeply moving plays by Harold Pinter.

The Lover - Behind closed suburban doors, a couple’s desires are unlocked, unzipped and undressed. With Richard Coyle as 'Richard', Gina McKee as 'Sarah' and Charlie Cox as 'John'.

The Collection - A confession of adultery leads to an intriguing battle of suspicion, bluff and jealousy. With Timothy West as 'Harry', Richard Coyle as 'James', Gina McKee as 'Stella' and Charlie Cox as 'Bill'.

"Explosively funny" The Independent

"In Jamie Lloyd's frisky new productions, they are cheeky and steeped in Englishness - rancid with sexual repression and lip-curling social contempt... Lloyd's cast is sprightly with the dialogue. And the brisker they are, the bleaker: even home truths sound like glacial small talk. No wonder Noel Coward appreciated Pinter. The chatter might be snatched from Private Lives: "How sickening you are, how tepid." Caught in solitary shafts of light, the characters work hard to mine their pleasure." The Sunday Times

"Charlie Cox stages a dazzling West End debut" The London Evening Standard
"Gina McKee lights up both pieces with a thrilling eroticism and air of mystery" The Daily Telegraph
"Richard Doyle is tremendous" The Observer

"The epithet Pinteresque suggests ambiguity, elusiveness and highly charged conversation riddled with pregnant pauses. But Pinters plays can also be a tease, fabulously, if fitfully, funny, and always at someones expense. Jamie Lloyds beautifully performed pair of Sixties television plays, The Lover and The Collection, are staged as authentic period pieces, but while the manners and mannerisms have dated, theres nothing old-fashioned about the games the characters are playing." The Mail on Sunday

"Jet-black comic thriller" Variety

"[In The Lover] you might feel, at first, that Jamie Lloyd is pushing the comedy, producing Pinter Lite.. crucially, Lloyd's leading actors are so deft that the mood can turn on a sixpence, and it darkens sharply. As for the narrative twists, Pinter explores lovers' multilayered fantasies with a Pirandellian ingenuity which is psychologically enthralling. The play is a maze of warped mirrors which leads you, in the end, to question whether anything was for real in the first place. A powerful vortex of doubt is also generated in the comparable four-hander, The Collection... Worth catching." The Independent on Sunday

"See the play. Enjoy it. Immaculate" The Times

"Neither of these early plays, The Lover and The Collection, originally written for television in the 1960s, is first-division Pinter. At times, they seem too slender to sustain themselves. But they go together like twinset and pearls and it is for the occasional pearls that they earn their keep. Both are about marriage and its torments. Each shows that imagined betrayal is as potent as proven infidelity. In The Lover... the dialogue is full of speedy innuendo, delivered crisply, as if they were in a Noel Coward play gone strangely awry... Jamie Lloyd directs both plays with the necessary sang-froid." The Observer