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Sunday 7 September 2008

Grief and groans

Purgatorio
Arcola

Happy Now?
Cottesloe

The Lover/The Collection
Comedy

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.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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