Caught out
Lloyd Evans
The Changeling Barbican Rabbit Old Red Lion There’s an amazing pace and energy about Declan Donnellan’s production of The Changeling at the Barbican. The story — unfamiliar to most of us — feels like a hotchpotch of borrowed Shakespearean plots. The arrogant but ravishing noblewoman Joanna is betrothed to a foreign prince she despises. Her disfigured manservant de Flores, himself besotted with his mistress, agrees to help her out by sticking a knife in the obnoxious fiancé. Job done and de Flores raises his price. Joanna’s purse is no longer enough. He demands her person. Surprisingly, both these twisted, self-serving characters catch our sympathy. We like Joanna because she’s a slave of the marriage market. We like de Flores because he burns with desire for an unobtainable beauty and because his face is blighted by a severe case of ‘quattro formaggi’ acne. The conspiracy has terrible consequences, and the scenes in which Joanna first rejects de Flores and finally succumbs to him are as fine and subtle a piece of psychological drama as has ever been written. The production is let down by Nick Ormerod’s no-concept modern set in which a Spanish castle of the 1600s is represented by Youth Hostel furnishings, a sink, a telly, a fridge and an EXIT sign with one of those little green figures rushing to escape. This is all non sense. And the ‘lighting’, or rather the ‘gloaming’, is so clumsily designed and murkily executed that you need a good few minutes for your eyes to adjust to the twilight. But none of this matters because the acting is of such a dazzlingly high calibre.
Olivia Williams is a sensational Joanna, all purring sexuality and tortured lust. Williams is so well endowed with Merchant–Ivory qualities — beauty, sophistication, charisma and intelligence — that it’s amazing she hasn’t yet been sucked into the profitable blandness of the Dickens/Hardy/Forster remake industry. Thank God for that. This is a performance of terrific power and range and I can’t think of another actress of her age who could have done it better.
She’s matched, if not surpassed, by William Keen as de Flores. Keen is one of those understated naturalistic players who pulls off the old actor’s trick of speaking the lines as if he’d only just thought them up. Robert Hardy does this all the time. You pause just before the end of the sentence, raise your head in mild confusion, then deliver the just-found word with eyeswide surprise, sometimes adding a lastminute jab of the finger to emphasise how very unexpected it all is. It’s handy if you’re playing a Regency cad or a dotty Victorian prime minister, but Keen’s approach here is more comprehensive and compelling. He brings out all of de Flores’s bitterness and manipulative cruelty while making him understandable, warm and vulnerable. And all the time he acts — or rather behaves — with thrilling unpredictability. I can’t recommend this show highly enough. I should add that there’s a bizarre, long-winded subplot involving a young nobleman trapped in a madhouse who tries to seduce a physician’s wife by posing as a clown. No idea what that was about. Should have been binned.
Rabbit, the first play by Nina Raine, is the sort of production I thought I would never see on the fringe. One, it’s entertaining. Two, it’s about posh white people. Three, it isn’t itching to remind us how nasty, painful and unjust life is. Nina Raine writes about the people she knows, and it’s not hard to guess what kind of people they are. In her script she describes the cast. ‘The girls are all attractive. Ditto the boys.’ Not an incontinent amputee among them. I’m interested. The main character, Ruth, has summoned a group of her pals to a chic London bar to celebrate her 29th birthday. Here they all are — the doctor, the barrister, the PR girl, the banker. During an evening of heavy drinking, we learn that Ruth still yearns for her old flame, Richard. Not much else happens, but Raine has such a brilliant gift for characterisation and her dialogue is so full of wit, self-confidence and honesty that the play is completely riveting. The actors (also directed by Raine) have been skilfully encouraged to give highly realistic performances. At times I had the eerie sensation that I was eavesdropping on genuine conversations. Even the aphorisms sounded like the sort of things that real people say. ‘Look under a ponytail and you always find an arsehole.’ Not bad. Might try using it myself. This is a truly stunning début. I can’t wait for more.
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