THE SECOND PLAY in this year's Harold Pinter festival offers, like the first, another tersely-drawn and compelling 55 minutes of sheer theatre. We discover Devlin and Rebecca in an elegant room that looks well-furnished yet unlived-in. They seem to be in mid-conversation. She is speaking of a man who, for example, would stand over her and clench his fist in her face and put his hand around her throat. He might have been a tour guide, or the owner of a damp factory where the staff wore soft caps and smiled. He might have been a man who walked up and down a railway platform and took babies from the arms of their screaming mothers.

Rebecca heard a police siren. Devlin did not. She recalls a pen rolling off a table and falling to the floor while she was writing a laundry list.

Was the pen innocent? Was it an orphan?

Devlin speaks of being in a quicksand. Like God? Mustn't talk ill of the only God we've got. He might leave us and that would be like England playing Brazil in an empty and silent Wembley stadium. Did Rebecca have tea with her sister Kim and the kids? Was it in Dorset (where Devlin had not been) that she had seen people walking with bags into the sea?

And so it goes, he asking and she responding some of the time, she volunteering at other times, if only to change the subject.

Under the author's very measured direction it is, as might be expected, rationally incoherent, yet emotionally loaded. But the voices carry no emotional tones and the talk sounds as if it ought to be rational. Thus, overt emotion is buried and the incoherence becomes theatrically cohesive and dramatically compelling.

Frank Hallinan Flood's setting is suitably clinical and Alan Burrett's lighting is perfect, taking us (with dramatic suitability) from day to night almost without our noticing that the sky outside the big central window has darkened. "And the performances by Lindsay Duncan and Stephen Rea, both icily controlled yet clearly mutually dependent, each a stranger yet a partner, are superb.