[In the following review, Nightingale responds unfavorably to Harold Pinter's production of Exiles at the Mermaid Theater.]

Last autumn, I was part of the critical consensus that almost unreservedly applauded the revival of James Joyce's Exiles at the Mermaid; this, I'm not so sure. Harold Pinter's production hasn't been improved by partial recasting and removal to the Aldwych. The introspective tone has become somewhat mechanical; the silences, too studied and self-conscious. Where it was meditative and even profound, it now often seems merely downbeat. On the second night, a man near me fell asleep and gently snored, and the audience as a whole reacted in a detached, relaxed manner when Richard Rowan (John Wood) extracted from his wife (Vivien Merchant) the physical details of her embryo affair with his best friend (T. P. McKenna). They laughed, as if the scene which had held us fixed and agog at the Mermaid was now no more than comic relief, and I found myself internally growling at the insistent artificialities of Miss Merchant's performance. Why do so many of her speeches seem to start with an emphatic, raucous pant and end in a tremulous gasp? What might have been the most interesting character in the play, a gauche, warm, ingratiating, frightened woman, very aware of her mental and her husband's emotional limitations, has become a gracious, slightly nervous nonentity.

It is a pity, because the play itself is undeniably interesting, notwithstanding Joyce's bookish tendency to cram in more information and implication than the naturalistic form will happily tolerate. The idea, as I see it, is to map out some of the frontiers of intimate relationships. ‘Who am I that I should consider myself master of your heart, or of any woman's?’ asks Rowan of his wife, and he is, of course, absolutely right in principle. Marriage shouldn't be a property contract: it should depend on choice and consent. But she's bewildered and hurt by the freedom he grants her; and he can neither be sure that his motives in granting it are genuinely altruistic nor quite control a nagging jealousy. The experiment ends sadly, with the best friend making a furtive, embarrassed escape from Dublin to the presumed safety of Surrey. People, it seems, need their frontiers and their maps; they cannot bear too much uncharted freedom. Joyce's conclusion is certainly a conservative one, but you feel it emerges from long reflection and personal pain. It can't be disregarded, and the play should still be seen by those who missed it at the Mermaid, both for itself and for the one performance that has not deteriorated: Wood's Rowan, a tense, lugubrious ironist, sudden and snappish when he speaks but abnormally still when he sits, watches and broods. He is the lizard and the others the flies: no wonder they fear his tongue.