THE HOTHOUSE Trafalgar Studios

When Harold Pinter was a young man and short of cash he had volunteered to be a guinea pig for some tests at the Maudsley Psychiatric Hospital. In 1958 he used this experience in a flawed play which remained in a bottom drawer until 1980 when he directed it; and by then what had been written in fantasy had become a political reality. Jamie Lloyd’s revival goes all out for laughs and a Kafkaesque nightmare is turned into a Joe Orton farce and is never as chilling as it ought to be. The action, which begins with a murder and ends in a massacre, is set in a government-run asylum where the inmates (whom we do not see) are known only by numbers. The principal is an incompetent bully, no longer fully in charge, and given to outbursts of rage against his insolent subordinates who are after his job. Simon Russell Beale is often very funny, but he never feels right for the role. His performance is far too light-weight and does not have the menace Pinter brought to it when he acted it. John Simm’s deliberately bland Deputy is much nearer the mark. John Heffernan has one of the play’s comic high spots when he delivers a farcically long list of hospital activities a visitor could participate in. Harry Milling is also very funny in a nervously energetic way.