Pinter's famous pauses and silences lie inert on the page until an insightful director helps his actors explore the worlds they contain; reading Pinter, even more than most playwrights, is like looking at a map and trying to see the mountains. It helps immeasurably to have a director who has traveled this way many times before.
It also helps to have actors who know the lay of the land, and at the ART Wheeler has assembled a four-man cast of remarkable perception, strength, and delicacy. In the roles of two aging writers (originally played by Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, leaving some fairly huge shoes to fill), we have Paul Benedict, as the mysterious and faintly mystified host, Hirst, and Max Wright as Spooner, the more disheveled and less successful poet who has apparently come home with Hirst after meeting him in a pub.
"Apparently" is necessary because Pinter, to the audible frustration of some audience members, never actually explains who these men are, either to themselves or to each other. Nor does he clarify the positions of the two vaguely menacing younger men who soon join this peculiar soiree: Foster, who introduces himself as Hirst's son but never says why he has a different surname, and Briggs, a tougher bloke who, like Foster, seems more likely a captor, a parasitic lodger, or a pickup than a genuine loved one.
On the other hand, it's possible that something else entirely is going on. Maybe Hirst is completely senile, and that's why he keeps calling the others by different names. Then again, maybe Spooner really is named Charles Wetherby and really did know Hirst at Oxford, and maybe they're just toying with the younger guys. Or maybe Foster and Briggs are some version, real or remembered, of the older men's younger selves -- an option that's nicely hinted at, in one of several subtle costuming touches by David Reynoso, by having Briggs enter wearing a beret identical to Spooner's.
