Nicholas de Jongh

A theatrical snack from Harold Pinter's impressive menu - food for thought for all occasions - is usually far more nourishing than a full-scale meal from more conventional sources. And so it proves in the case of Pinter's beautiful, rarely performed Monologue. In this ghostly, wistful reverie a solitary man is besieged by memories of old times when he and his "best mate" were both lovers of a black girl who transferred her affections from one to the other. But in Pinter nothing, fortunately, is straightforward. A governing sense of strangeness and enigma is at once conveyed by the setting.

The Man, played by Henry Woolf, who has been Pinter's close friend for more than five decades, sits or wanders around. He pitches his words in the direction of an empty armchair, at the foot of which he places a half-pint of beer - although the text gives no such direction. It's as though he were speaking to the dead or the vanished. There are also echoes of other Pinter plays, The Collection and Betrayal, where two chaps compete for the same woman and, in the process, betray a homoerotic feeling for each other.

The Man may lyrically recall his train-station farewell to "my darling black darling", but such erotic musings give way to jocular memories of life with his brilliant, best mate and veiled intimations of how much he misses him. Gari Jones's production, except when it stresses the obvious by playing These Foolish Things Remind me of You, is in the right melancholic mode. Henry Woolf, radiating perkiness, mischief and camp, charmingly recalls the two men's youth, but makes light of his character's desolate loneliness and recurrent longing for his dear, departed friend.

Monologue