Ashes to Ashes; One for the Road at the Maidment Studio

Ashes to Ashes, with Michael Lawrence and Rachel Nash, is about mass murder.

Playwright Harold Pinter has a long history of political activism, but his reputation was established with plays that avoid any reference to topical events. It is clear that in making the transition to overtly political writing he has thought long and hard about how political anger might be translated into effective drama.

His approach is diametrically opposed to the recent crop of political movies that supply precise instructions on how we should think about a range of current issues.

Pinter's method is far more challenging, throwing up insidious, haunting images that get under the skin and demand a response.

His most famous plays are intriguing because they refuse to disclose what they are about. But there is no ambiguity about the subject matter of the works presented in this double bill - One for the Road deals with torture, while Ashes to Ashes speaks of the atrocity of mass murder.

David Aston's mesmerising performance creates a deeply disturbing portrait of a torturer. As the director of a detention centre he has detached himself from the grisly business that he oversees and comes across as an efficient manager who would not be out of place in any government department. At the same time, Aston reveals the morbid psychology of violence through casual references to routine acts of brutality.

Ashes to Ashes is a more complex and satisfying play. It was inspired by a biography of Albert Speer, a highly cultured man who was responsible for organising the slave-labour factories in Nazi Germany.

Pinter ignores the specific historical narrative and focuses on the impossibility of dealing with knowledge of an atrocity. It is a strategy that implicates the audience as we all live in a world that constantly supplies us with graphic description of human cruelty.

This conundrum is brought home with two superb performances.

In the part of Devlin, Michael Lawrence appears genuinely concerned about the distressing memories that are haunting his partner. But whenever the horrific truth is articulated he retreats into small talk or absurd reflections on guilt or innocence. In these moments Lawrence finds a weird, schizophrenic voice as if speaking from outside his body.

Equally impressive is Rachel Nash's performance as a woman who is tormented by the knowledge that she once loved a man who was the embodiment of evil.

At the end of the play she finds a way forward by projecting herself into a complete imaginative identification with the victims of her cruel lover.

With this image Pinter offers a ray of hope, suggesting that the simple, human emotion of sympathy may be the catalyst for a meaningful response to violence.