Grief and groans
Lloyd Evans
Purgatorio Arcola Happy Now? Cottesloe The Lover/The Collection Comedy
Purgatorio. Hardly a seductive title and I confess it was curiosity rather than enthusiasm that dragged me to the Arcola in Hackney to see how Ariel Dorfman (best known for his 1992 play Death and the Maiden) had handled the Medea myth. His update transplants the characters to a therapy unit and the play opens with Medea under analysis describing in lacerating detail how she killed her children. Confusingly, her cell is furnished with a kitchen knife which she occasionally brandishes in the analyst’s face. More confusingly, he shrugs the threat aside as if she were waving a lollipop at him. Then the roles are reversed. Medea becomes the shrink and Jason becomes the shrunk and she subjects him to a very cross crossexamination. Therapist Medea seems even more aggressive than murderess Medea and for much of the time it’s unclear whether the characters realise they’re interrogating their former partners. That’s fine. All part of the tease.
Less fine is the decision of the director, Daniele Guerra, to make the actors unleash their feelings rather than suggest them. Grief is the hardest emotion to express theatrically because it seems to call for the most theatricality. Cascades of tears, knotted eyebrows, twining forearms, heaving shoulders and torsos sliding earthwards, all the predictable fare from the RADA larder are put on display and all fail to move us. In the closing stages both actors succumb to hysterics and shriek at each other like strimmers. Always a bad moment when actors turn up the amps to 11. The result is boredom and disengagement. To uncover every inch of sentiment leaves the audience with no space to imagine what else the character may be suffering and reduces spectators to passive dullard witnesses. This is an overheated production of a head-splittingly gloomy play but east London clearly has a taste for Wagnerian torments. The show is all but a sell-out.
At first sight Lucinda Coxon’s new play at the Cottesloe is a sitcom. Two marriages in crisis, an affable gay man offering advice, and a prowling singleton up for casual sex. The mood is upbeat, feelgood. Nasty snippy Miles and his stiflingly snobbish wife take second place to Kitty, a sex-bomb charity worker, and her husband Johnny, a painfully nice English teacher. What elevates the play above ‘My Family’ level is its psychological maturity and emotional truth. And the script is witty in a way that makes it hard to unstitch a sample from the quilt, but let’s try. When cynical Miles walks out on his wife he tells her, ‘If women were dominoes you’d be the double blank.’ Johnny teaches his class how punctuation modifies meaning by writing on the blackboard ‘Nietzsche said God is dead’. He then inserts commas after Nietzsche and God. Too cerebral for telly. Olivia Williams carries the entire production and gives Kitty an enthralling mix of intelligence, vulnerability and a sort of unflappable blokeish sexiness. Stanley Townsend, as a tempting Irish philanderer, turns his small role into a miracle of melancholy charm. This is a wonderfully entertaining and superficial play. It says nothing. It won’t last. Thank God. It’s just fun.
Harold Pinter’s The Lover is a short antique work which feels bang up-to-date. A husband and wife both have extra-marital affairs but their ‘liaisons’ involve only themselves in disguise. Thin idea, almost a sketch, but Pinter has transformed this slice of absurdism into an intense and brilliantly realised dramatic world which delivers a fascinating critique of sexual relationships. They’re all pretence. Each partner dramatises a notional version of themselves which complements the role invented by their mate. Married life is theatre. Gina McKee works wonders with the limited role of the wife, and rather than play her like a zombified sex-slave she exudes a knowing lusty haughtiness which is eerie and very funny. Opposite her, Richard Coyle’s confused and snaky eroticism is fascinatingly ambivalent. The second half of the double bill, The Collection, centres on an unreliable allegation of sexual betrayal. Looser and less structurally satisfying than The Lover, this might have been an anticlimax but for Timothy West’s hilarious performance as a louche old queen presiding over a gay ménage. These aren’t easy or inviting works and it’s their very weirdness that makes them interesting. Pinter talks of his inspiration as ‘an insistence in my mind’ that drives him to write. That may sound pretentious but it makes sense if you see these two plays. They have precisely the quality Eliot ascribed to Blake, ‘the unpleasantness of great poetry’.
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