Theatre
In Extremis/De Profundis (National Theatre) The Duchess of Malfi (Barbican) Molly Bloom (Jermyn Street)
Wilde evening
Sheridan Morley
Aalways with Oscar Wilde, I have interests to declare: my father Robert was the first actor to play him on stage and screen, and my parents only met because of that original 1936 play, so in a quite literal sense I owe Oscar my life, which is I guess why I have been one of his several hundred biographers.
But now, in his centenary year, we have a new piece of the jigsaw. Neil Bartlett's 50- minute In Extremis (which forms half of a brilliant and engaging new Corin Redgrave double-bill at the Cottesloe) takes as its theme the little-known fact that on the night of 24 March 1895, just a day or two before Oscar had to make the fateful deci- sion about whether or not to sue the Mar- quess of Queensberry for libel, the decision which led to his imprisonment and some would say early death in Paris 100 years ago next month, he visited a fashionable society palm-reader, one Mrs Robinson. What happened during that palm-reading, none of us can ever know; but Bartlett pos- tulates, not unreasonably, that Oscar went to ask her to give him some sort of forecast of his immediate future, and that she told him she foresaw a great triumph. As all his plays had by then opened, she was presum- ably encouraging him to go ahead with the case; but did she do so out of genuine belief or rather out of malice? Did she, in other words, take an instant dislike to an already known homosexual and unfaithful husband, and decide (like his lover Bosie, but for other motives) to push him towards gaol? Alternatively, when she talks of a tri- umph, does she perhaps mean that of Queensberry?
Bartlett has no answers, but the question is intriguing enough; and Sheila Hancock as the palmist perfectly captures the twi- light world of the fortune-teller, or in this case misfortune-teller, who may think she knows it all or may just be an evil old bat. Corin Redgrave is touchingly hopeful as her client, but truly comes into his own in the second half of this triumphant evening, when, by now alone in the cell in Reading gaol two years later, he simply performs the 50-minute monologue that is De Profundis.
Under a glimpse of sky, he narrates the full horror of his relationship with Bosie, the depths to which he has sunk, and the pale hope that there might now be a resur- rection as he is about to be released. We know, of course, that there never was; but Redgrave's triumph is to make us see the hope as well as the despair; the surviving passion for Alfred Douglas as well as the loathing of what he has done to him. It is a Wilde night, and it is all Redgrave's in a performance which is only matched in energy and intelligence across town by that of Simon Callow as Charles Dickens. All in all, a very good London winter for solo shows about great 19th-century writers fac- ing their very different demons.
`Why don't you get yourself a job?' At the Barbican, Gale Edwards has a modern-dress Duchess of Malfi for the RSC, one which attempts to put Webster's bloodbath into a contemporary, black-tie context but ends up looking faintly ludi- crous: it is not that people don't do such things any more, just that Hollywood and television do it all so much better and in close-up.
In the title role, Aisling O'Sullivan bears a remarkable if distracting likeness to the present Duchess of York, while Tom Man- nion (standing or at any rate lurking in for an indisposed Neil Dudgeon) manages a fine Scots Bosola, reeking of doom and destruction. But Peter J. Davison's green- house of a set seems to clutter the stage, only occasionally used but forcing the entire cast to work so far downstage that they might almost as well be in front of the curtain.
There is no real sense of an outdoors, and while claustrophobic intensity is clearly what Gale Edwards wants, she sacrifices so much else for her special effects that we lose any real feeling for Italy, let alone the all-important tension of the fate that awaits the nameless Duchess. Moreover, modern dress makes disembodied hands and a pregnancy test involving unripe apricots seem ludicrously out of period; once again, a good idea leads to trouble further down the line.
This is not nearly so strong or nail-biting a production as the one Philip Franks achieved a few years ago on a much more slender budget with Juliet Stevenson at Greenwich, but it does have its gothic- opera moments, not least in the madhouse and the final separation of the Duchess from her children. In the end, though, you are left with the feeling that neither direc- tor nor designer nor cast quite trust this revenger's tragedy enough to play it as written. Once again a director, one of the best, has somehow got herself caught between the play and its audience, standing in its way as often as she manages to clear a new path through it.
It is unclear why the James Joyce Estate has objected so violently to Molly Bloom at Jermyn Street. What we have here, down from the Edinburgh Festival, is an intrigu- ing 90-minute song-cycle written and per- formed by the singer Anna Zapparoli and her husband, the songwriter-pianist Mario Borciani. What they have developed is Molly Bloom's soliloquy in songs which range from Irish anthems to cabaret num- bers, many influenced by a weird combina- tion of Kurt Weill and William Walton in his Façade mood. You need to be some- thing of a Joyce addict to work out precise- ly what is going on in some of these, but Anna Zapparoli has a fine, louche manner, stretched out across the piano in her night- dress, and (like Richard Nelson's recent hit off-Broadway with The Dead) the sugges- tion here is that maybe Joyce, who always wanted to be a singer, should have turned to stage musicals himself.
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