Moonlight deals with that most fundamental of truths; that we all will one day die. However this is a Pinter piece, so while the play retains a razor sharp poignancy, Pinter’s surrealist edge creeps in as the characters engage in a battle of inhuman eloquence.
The Donmar Warehouse’s revival stars David Bradley, who gives an awe-inspiring, understated performance as the dying protagonist, a choleric ex-Civil Servant. Confined to his deathbed with just the company of his facetious wife – played with unwavering calm by Deborah Findlay – he desperately yearns to be reunited with his sons and, in later, less lucid moments, his dead teenage daughter and the children she could never have borne.
On the other side of the stage, mirroring their father’s state of forced rest, the two sons exist in a picture of squalor, the youngest Fred (Liam Garrigan) lying in a dirty bed, the other, Jake (Daniel Mays), flitting between bouts of physical performance and fitful sleep. As they fantasise about their past, the pair perform surreal skits, becoming different characters and blurring the lines of reality, leaving their true identities secret from the audience until a heartbreaking and ultimately revealing conclusion.
On Bunny Christie’s minimalist stage, the characters bask in a suitably moon-like light that piercingly frames the blue-carpeted floor and back wall. Divided into two halves, with the father and his sons split by the cruellest of separations, Bijan Sheibani’s tight direction allows the two to interact, with Bradley’s coughs or flippant rants momentarily disturbing the two sons from sleep.
Both husband and wife are visited by ghosts of the past who serve to remind them of the things they have lost, simultaneously portraying images of the people they once were for the audience; the bed ridden old man once a regular in the pub, the wife a vivacious young woman who finds solace in the arms of another.
While Moonlight is little over an hour long, Pinter’s poetic wordplay and his powerfully real characters cover a lifetime of emotions and the play is as dense as wading through treacle. Love, mortality, loss, anger and the need for redemption are universal themes and Pinter shows them to us here in the most mysterious and haunting of ways.
CM