A tragicomic curiosity at the Finborough written by Hebridean exile Iain Finlay Macleod. The show opens with James, a young Gaelic-speaker, running an internet start-up in London. Business booms. He grows rich and marries his gorgeous university squeeze. The only snag in his life, and it’s quite a serious one, is that he suffers from a constant urge to turn a somersault whenever something remarkable happens. Bust-up with the wife. Somersault! Best mate arrives from college. Somersault! Business goes broke. Somersault! Dad contracts cancer. Somersault!
Short of cash and plunged into despair, James is visited by a creepy bailiff who engages him in obliquely amiable conversation while bagging up his collection of LPs. (An LP, for younger readers, is a recording format from the days when music was exchanged for money.) James’s wife — a role so underwritten that she might as well be a bewigged mute — is appalled to discover that she’s been severed from her hubbie’s pot of loot so she punches the ejector button and lands on his best mate.
Skint and freshly cuckolded, James mopes up to the Hebrides and holds a series of increasingly lightweight conversations with his increasingly lightweight father. They speak Gaelic much of the time. No subtitles. It’s rather soothing to hear a pair of melancholics swapping inscrutable pleasantries in a sub-Arctic, singsong tongue but it makes for a depthless and baffling drama.
In the closing minutes, the script shifts into a different genre, the lecture, which is probably what it wanted to be all along. A strangely foul-mouthed dissertation it is, too. Hard to understand why Macleod chose to sprinkle his philological observations with lots of effing and blinding. The actors clearly find it uncomfortable and a sensitive director would have purged the expletives. Anyway, ‘bairns’ is Gaelic for ‘babies’. Clan means ‘children’, and the northern English affirmative ‘smashing’ comes from ‘s math sin’, ‘that’s good’.
Existentialists in need of revision can scoot over to Cross Purpose by Albert Camus at the King’s Head. Camus wrote just a handful of plays and his inexperience shows in this sadistic family farce, which begins with Jan, aged 38, returning home after an absence of 20 years. His mum and younger sister don’t recognise him. This is a pity because they’ve opened a hotel with an unusual business model. A prosperous guest is likely to be murdered in his room by the co-manageresses who nick all his stuff and sling his body in the river.
Stephen Whitson’s production goes to huge lengths to bring out the squalor of Camus’s imagined world. The creamy white cheeks of the female actors are highlighted with skidmarks, and their elegant period clothes have been carefully massaged with cowpats and pig’s ordure. The bedroom-cum-death-chamber is decorated with ripped wallpaper encrusted with tobacco stains, spilled claret and flung soup. And each time a towel is picked up, a cloudburst of soot erupts into the air. You could tip the contents of a fire grate over the entire cast and not make them significantly dirtier.
As a result of Jan’s visit, his family are forced to confront their criminality and his sister confesses her guilt in a detached and utterly shameless fashion. This shocking scene is fun to watch but it takes an hour and a half to reach it. Heavily cut and played at a ripping pace, this play might make an agreeably bleak entertainment for fashionable depressives. But a floating voter like me is bound to find it clumsy, shallow and melodramatic.
As Camus recedes, his renown disintegrates. The visuals are good. The back story is unusual. And no one can argue with the Nobel Prize. His pinched, handsome features looked great on camera, especially with a Gauloise stuck on his lower lip and the collar of his coat turned up. And he used to be a goalie. Is there anything more? Like the poetess Stevie Smith — ‘not waving but drowning’ — his reputation rests on a single catchy utterance. ‘Today, mother died. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know.’ A terrific opening but the rest of L’Etranger doesn’t match it for emotional firepower.
The movements he was attached to — Existentialism and Absurdism — derive their authority from their grandiose polysyllabic names and the capital initials with which they’re spelled. Call them Sulkiness and Silliness and they’d forfeit any claim on our attention. ‘I’m a Sulkyist.’ ‘I’m a follower of Sillyism.’ No one would announce such an apostleship. And the Existentialists added nothing new to the philosophical canon since the Stoics pointed out that life’s a bummer but you might as well get on with it. However, the play is running in Islington where an acquaintance with miserable French hipsters is a key status indicator. It’s busy at the box-office.
Comments