There are some theatrical evenings over which it would be best to draw not only veils but also gags.

I fear Pinter's People is one of those embarrassing occasions. Bill Bailey, Kevin Eldon, Geraldine McNulty and Sally Phillips are the four performers, whose styles of performance frequently descend to burlesque and the vulgar grotesque.

All too often, thanks to the licence for coarse acting supplied by director Sean Foley, they distort and diminish this anthology of sketches written by Harold Pinter since 1959.

The actors frequently play at the top of their exaggerated voices and show off the bottom of their talents. Pinter's People are interfered with rather than brought to life.

The pieces range in tone from the dark, absurdly comic sketches he wrote for theatre revues in the late 1950s to the cool political satires of the 1980s and later.

They need light, shade and subtlety to make their comic or horrifying point and would have been more interestingly played in chronological order.

Sometimes, as when Bailey's suave government minister in Press Conference (2002) genially explains that where children pose a subversive threat they will be violently killed, the angry not very subtle point about totalitarian government is well made.

On the disappointing other hand, The New World Order (1991) in which a blindfold man is about to be tortured, Bailey and Eldon, as two agents of government authority, play with a heavy-handed jocularity that make them silly rather than terrifying.

Similarly in Last to Go (1959) a cafe-stall owner and an evening newspaper seller ought to be comic-pathetic models of vacuity, loneliness and non- communication. Instead, Bailey and Eldon send them grotesquely up.

McNulty and Phillips variously playing a crazy xenophobe and two tramps passing the lonely time in desultory conversation are even more prone than the men to make a gross mockery of their characters.

It is admittedly interesting to hear hints and omens of fully developed Pinter as in Night (1969), where a husband and wife fall back on completely conflicting memories of their early romancing life. Even so I could not help thinking that none of these sketches show Pinter to good advantage.

There is, meanwhile, a long-neglected store of strange, beautiful short Pinter plays, such as Family Voices, Landscape, Silence and The Collection. In them are discovered quintessential Pinter people whom I long to meet again.