Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 15

EVENING STANDARD THURSDAY 14 MAY 1998 Id A kind of triumph once the sex has been put to bed FIRST NIGHTJ by Nicholas de Jongh Stoid: Pinter proves atsappomtflig in The Al iioaecaon ns one play that touches on homosexuaBty Pictures: ALASTAIRMUIR 3 By Pinter Donmar Warehouse TO SEE Harold Pinter dressed in a floral dressing-gown and acting in one of his own plays as Harry a middle-aged gay chap something small in the rag trade ought to inspire one of the theatrical frissons of the year But what an old-fashioned disappointment this Pinter performance and indeed his own 1960s play The Collection proves to be Of the three Pinter one-acters in this over-long evening only that little masterpiece A Kind Of Alaska makes the night worthwhile The Collection is the one Pinter play which discreetly touches upon homosexuality without anyone being actually touched up on stage Flitting between smart homes in Belgravia and Chelsea The Collection is not so much a sexual whodunnit or even did-they-do-it as a study of sexual jealousy competitiveness and ambivalence Did Bill a young dress-designer living with Harry in what Pinter clearly intended to be some sort of gay manage actually have sex with Lia love-lorn Stella in a Leeds hotel? husband James whom Douglas Hodge plays with a truculent edginess and young Harry feel the anxious need to pry out the truth You would think that today all elegantly understated intimations of gayness and of obviously erotic interest in Bill could be brought from the closets of reticence Not in the sex-suppressed purity zone of Joe light-weight production stolid Harry sounding more like a dyspeptic colonel than Noel Coward is about as gay or camp as a night in Knightsbridge Barracks Douglas James and Colin Bill repress rather than reveal the flickerings of gay desire At least though the play does not betray its television origins as obviously as The Lover in which a jaded middle-class husband and wife only enjoy each other sexually with the aid of role-play This is astute comedy of sexual manners suggesting how some couples can only fulfil their unbuttoned sexual fantasies when they assume new personalities And by the end fantasy has had to Stupendous: Penelope orawjch stm deeper Wlton wHh Bdl Nighyin the poetic A Kind Of Alaska Lia Williams looks the provocative part as the wife while Douglas Hodge teeters on verge But now no concealing that variations on this erotic theme are repetitive not illuminating The real illuminations come early on with A Kind Of Alaska inspired by Oliver book Awakenings about the 1916 epidemic of sleeping sickness and those briefly woken with the drug L-Dopa This brief poetic masterpiece evokes the state of mind of a woman who wakes in her hospital bed after 29 years of oblivion convinced that she is still in adolescence Penelope Wilton with lank hair staring eyes and a look of engrossed blankness begins to speak in a high young voice Pinter poetically distills the essence of a life petrified in long-lost middle-class adolescence and the confused reluctant drift into the present Karel production is beautifully pitched Bill Nighy expresses a grave medical sympathy Miss Wilton is quite stupendous conveying a sense of her fraught bewildered return to the world from which she has been lost Just stay for this play Ratings: adequate good very good outstanding poor More reviews: Piage 44 Heart poaches Jensen CAPITAL Radio DJ David Jensen has been poached by rivals Heart FM in a deal rumoured to be worth more than half a million pounds Jensen 48 will present drivetime and weekend shows once his Capital contract expires next month Heart said the DJ had been offered a six-figure package to join the station for three years.