Interview is a blind-date play. Only it’s not a blind date but a showbiz interview for a journal called the New York Chronicle. The characters (played by Robert Sean Leonard and Paten Hughes) bicker, flirt and get emotionally involved during a 90-minute conversation. Naturally it all starts badly. The interviewer, Pierre, arrives at Katya’s Brooklyn apartment and tells her straight off that he’s never seen her perform on TV or in a movie. He hates covering the lives of brattish starlets because he used to be the Courier’s ace political reporter but his career has been terminated. At least his journalistic skills are still intact and he makes her admit that she can’t name her mother’s birthplace in Georgia. She’s fibbing.
So the games begin. She decides to livestream their interview and she introduces him to her 15 million followers but he scuttles into a corner like a startled hedgehog. ‘What was that?’ he asks, when she finishes the broadcast. Really? He doesn’t know what the internet is. Or maybe he’s exploiting her naivety. Aged 28, she’s young enough to believe that nobody over 60 knows how to use a computer.
More tricks follow. She leaves the room to make a call to her boyfriend ‘Tom’ (who may be a girl, or a figment of her imagination) and he uses her absence to hunt through her laptop for secret files. He finds one. A video clip containing a shocking truth about her personal life but she catches him red-handed after wandering into the room unexpectedly. She affects outrage. He affects contrition. Or are they both still pretending?
The drama moves from one lame hoax to the next without catching fire. The dialogue is underpinned by an erotic tension that the performers show but don’t feel. At least Katya’s lack of interest in Pierre makes sense. Why would she want to seduce a balding overweight has-been with the dress sense of a trainspotter? To ignite her libido, he tells her that she reminds him of his dead daughter. An odd chat-up line. Or another bluff perhaps. He plays on his role as a father figure. ‘There’s a little girl called Katya who’s been fooling us all with the performance of her life,’ he says smugly. On hearing this, she melts into his arms and kisses him passionately. But the next moment, she rounds on him and curses his breath which stinks of ‘whisky and failure’.
Then comes a bit of horseplay in the porcelain bathtub, which is conveniently located next to the sofa, and she ends up dripping with water. What next? Oh, yes the plot. They agree to a bizarre pact. ‘Mutually assured destruction,’ they call it. Each must film the other admitting a dark secret, and both agree never to share the video clips with anyone else. Mmm. Let’s think. Will they stick to the deal or not? It’s almost impossible to care about these shallow double-crossers and their vapid witter.
The drama moves from one lame hoax to the next without catching fire
The show is lavishly produced with a sumptuous set by Derek McLane that looks entirely unlived in. That’s probably right for an overnight celeb like Katya. The rest of it is pointless chitchat soured by cynicism and poorly motivated hostility. At least it’s brief.
The Daughter of Time, dramatised by M. Kilburg Reedy, is a love letter to one of Shakespeare’s great anti-heroes, Richard III. The show is based on Josephine Tey’s novel about a posh English detective, Alan Grant, who investigates the murders of the princes in the tower.
Alan has lots of time to spare while he recovers in hospital from a leg wound, and he receives visits from friends who happen to share his fascination with medieval history. His close pal, Marta (Rachel Pickup), is a West End star who once played Lady Anne on stage and she wants to learn more about the character. Alan tells her that Richard knew Anne from childhood. She was a lifelong friend, not a victim of his devious lust. Sitting on the hospital bed, Alan and Marta enact the famous scene in which Richard woos Anne over the corpse of her father-in-law, Henry VI, whom Richard has just killed. The tension between them simmers and crackles because Marta adores Alan but he can’t express his long-buried feelings.
To pique his interest Marta gets engaged to a gay actor, Nigel Templeton, who enjoys playing the straight man for once. But Alan’s only response is to dive more deeply into Shakespeare’s sources which centre on a questionable biography of Richard written by Thomas More.
At times, the show feels like a dramatised dissertation with too much professorial detail and not enough raw emotion. But the acting is great and Bob Sterrett’s costumes are a treat. To get the most from this show, you need to do a bit of homework in advance. Alan’s verdict: the Duke of Buckingham dunnit.
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