Two’s company

Duet for One
Vaudeville

Ordinary Dreams
Trafalgar Studio

Therapy is celebrity by another name. An artificially created audience bears witness to your anguish and joy and enables you to resolve the terrible contradiction that underpins every human being’s world-view. Each of us, in his gut, feels like the star of his life. But in his head he knows he’s just one of billions of forgettable cameos. Celebrity and therapy resolve this conundrum. Therapy lets you believe your little world, and its problems are as significant as the rest of humanity. Celebrity forces the same belief. But while commentators everywhere decry celebrity and its narcissistic ramifications, no one is particularly bothered about the baleful influence of its elder sibling (I nearly said big brother), therapy. Duet for One by Tom Kempinski is a static, heavily textured drama about psychoanalysis which since its première in 1980 has been revived dozens of times around the world. It must be doing something right. The setting is banal, a book-lined office with a couch of crimson velvet where the fretting bourgeoisie come to offload their problems for 200 quid an hour. Henry Goodman’s pointy-bearded therapist is a pipe-smoking, cactus-watering, Beethoven-playing Hampstead cliché complete with green tweeds and a set-text questionnaire which he delivers in sinuous clusters of Viennese atonality. ‘Do you veep in ze morninks? Did you luff your muzzer? Do you zuffer from suezidal longinks?’ His patient, Juliet Stevenson, is a posh violinist with multiple sclerosis whose manual dexterity is collapsing nearly as fast as her marriage to a famous composer. There’s something over-neat about this arrangement. A fiddler with frazzled digits is a boil-in-the-bag crisis, a just-add-water tragedy. And the deployment of music as an emblem of love is equally unoriginal but the slow-moving drama gradually becomes more gripping as it evolves from a monologue into a duel.

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