Harold Pinter obviously believes in saving the best till last. The first two plays in Other Places, his new triple bill at the Cottesloe, are strange, comic and fascinating, but you would know they were by Pinter if you met them in your dreams. However the third, A Kind of Alaska, moves one in a way no work of his has ever done before; and it gets from Judi Dench a performance that will brand itself on the memory of all those lucky enough to see it.
The play was inspired by Oliver Sacks's book Awakenings; and it is about encephalitis lethargica (or sleeping sickness), which claimed five million victims from 1916 to 1926. What we see is a girl-woman coming to life again after a 29-year coma. She was struck still like marble in the act of putting down a vase at the age of 16. Now she wakes, unable to recognise her sister or the man who has watched over her. She is sad, bemused, fretful, questioning, conscious of having been on a strange journey but unable to get her emotional bearings.
It is a perfect metaphor for Pinter's fascination (which runs through the whole triple bill) with the no man's land between life and death. Most people have at some stage had the feeling that family, friends, lovers are phantoms in some dream; and this play uses an uncommon instance to tap a common experience. But it is also particular, moving and direct. It harks back to a lost upper-class world. It shows the weird comedy in being warmly greeted by relations you don't recognise ("You've aged - substantially," the heroine says to her grey-haired sister). It also, crucially, says that with this disease the watchers suffer more than the watched.
Never before have I known a Pinter play to leave one so emotionally wrung through; and much of the credit, in Peter Hall's exact production, belongs to the incredible Judi Dench. Her great, sad eyes roam the strange room seeking comfort.
But if this play deals emotionally with the theme of half-life, Family Voices handles it on Pinter's more familiar comic-metaphysic level. And a reminder that Pinter is also a born revue-sketch writer comes with Victoria Station in which Paul Rogers plays a flat-capped, foul-mouthed controller of radio cabs trying to make contact with an aberrant driver hunched over the wheel of his Ford Cortina. You could see it as a study in power and panic; or as a return to Pinter's early surrealist sketches.
