An insufferable hour of aimless chatter in a 1930s Italian garden has to be endured before Simon Gray's The Old Masters begins to come to its intriguing dramatic point.
The situation is saved by Peter Bowles's arrival as the most famous art dealer in the world, Joseph Duveen. All affable grandeur in a striped suit and black hat, Mr Bowles stands, arms outstretched, in the midst of the study belonging to the big art authority, Edward Fox's inscrutable Bernard Berenson.
"Let us embrace," Bowles coos in a voice that caresses words to the point of virtual indecency. Fox ignores him, sitting at his desk in a sulky, stoney-faced silence.
The scene is set for a male power-battle, with reputation and loads of money seductively at stake. Or is it? The fascination of The Old Masters has to do with the fact that the audience has to gather and guess just what each of the two famous men are after. Motives and meanings are shrouded in doubt.
A first, inept version of The Old Masters was published under the title of The Pig Trade and wisely never produced, though Gray has retained its central argument.
In dealing with a close encounter between real-life people, Berenson and Duveen, not to mention Berenson's wife Mary (Barbara Jefford) and his secretary/lover Nicky, the author does not say whether his play is based on fact or his own fiction. Nevertheless the contest between the two men, is conducted with serpentile guile.
This tremendously acted production by Harold Pinter, who has now directed nine of Gray's plays, finely tunes a tense bartering contest in which Duveen seems - and note the verb - to play the devil to Berenson's Faust.
The art expert, who for years has provided attributions for the dealer, is being offered a new, lucrative financial contract on condition that he agrees to desist from publishing his view that Giorgione's The Adoration of the Shepherds was really painted by Titian.
Fox's Berenson, speaking in that strangulated, upper-class drawl of a voice made famous by the 1960s Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, passes from hauteur to snarling fury, in face of the riveting Bowles's silken menace and disdain.
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But Barbara Jefford, terrific as Berenson's dying wife, and Sally Dexter's Nicky are final witnesses to the play's sharp warning about human deviousness.
Until 28 August. Information: 0870 060 6637.
The Old Masters
