Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter has only written four major plays since the 1990's, beginning with "Moonlight" (1993), a poetic collage about another dysfunctional family, revisiting many of his earlier themes of generations, responsibility, and death. There's little if any political significance. What drama there is is largely implied. The QE2 Players, in their annual outing at the BCA have given the work a careful journeyman like production. Director Michael Halloran uses the particular strengths of his diverse cast to let the language of the piece speak for itself, however obliquely.
Central to the piece is Andy, played by Jim Robinson. He's a retired civil servant raging against fate from his deathbed while Gwen Sweet is his patient and often acerbic wife, Bel. Their youngest, Bridget, played by Emma Stanton, functions as a minor chorus to the action and might in fact be a ghost. Their two sons, who're somewhere planning something, but doing very little, are Rob Rota as Jake and Travor Thompson as Fred. This duo is almost a parody of early Pinter by the master; their dialogue is almost entirely constructed from cliches. Jennifer Barton Jones and Edwin Bescheler are Maria and Ralph, friends of the family, who seem to be in contact with the boys, who are somehow estranged from their father. Maria may have been Andy's mistress. The action resists any definite interpretation. The ensemble concentrates on character and the moment.
The show's been kept simple. Cara McCarthy's set has two acting areas on levels with furniture, backed by a blue scrim overlaid with a grid of pinkish rectangles, with a kind of suggestive modernism. Kathy Maloney's lights help define the show from moment to moment. Andy Bergman has selected some trancy music to provide transitions. All in all it's an effective use of the oldest theatre space at the BCA. Costumes might be from any part of the last quarter century. The whole effort has the touch of the Absurd necessary to set off the obscure dialogue, which provides clues to the action, but little conclusion, just moonshine.