Two of Pinter’s most thought-provoking short plays, The Lover and A Kind Of Alaska, presented together.

The Lover

Richard and Sarah are the epitome of respectability (or so it seems). Pinter explores the darker underbelly of a suburban middle-class marriage and looks at how they are driven to extreme measures in order to keep their 10-year relationship alive. Written in 1963, it also acts as an allegory of of how the sexual revolution of the 60s impacted on the repression of the 50s.

A Kind Of Alaska

Deborah awakes after 29 years. She suffers from sleeping sickness. Inspired by Oliver Sacks’s Awakenings, A Kind Of Alaska tells of the Economo encephalitis lethargica epidemic, which spread through Europe in the early 20th century. A potentially fatal disease, but some survived and erupted into life upon receiving the drug L-DOPA. Deborah is one of these survivors…