What Fatima Did…
Hampstead
Mrs Klein
Almeida
What Fatima Did… is billed as a play. Really, it’s a fugue, a variation on a theme, a crude and boisterous tone poem. The plot is deliberately small-scale. A gang of fun-loving inner-city sixth-formers are shocked to learn that one of their pals, Fatima, has forsaken Western values and adopted the nijab. Her boyfriend George is hit hardest by her betrayal, and he retaliates by showing up at a costume party dressed as a medieval crusader. This gesture doesn’t quite work now that the flag of St George has been reinvented as a multicultural symbol. To freak Fatima out properly he’d have to dress as Adolf or Enoch.
That aside, this slender and skilfully elaborated drama is an outstanding piece of entertainment. I loved its cynical wit, its self-confident scepticism, its freedom, its energy and fun. I loved the cast, too, especially Farzana Dua Elahe as a mouthy Asian sex-pot. Here she is reacting to the suggestion that Fatima is merely expressing herself. ‘I find that offensive. I’m a Muslim and I don’t wear the nijab to “express myself”. I’d rather have a pint.’ Shobu Kapoor is hilarious, and moving, too, as the claret-swilling Pakistani mother who has fought all her life to drag her co-religionists into the light of modernity only to see her daughter plunge back into 13 centuries of darkness. Most of all I loved the audience and its gleeful reaction to this unsanitised glimpse of street culture. It’s rare to see a row of venerable Hampstead matrons quivering with laughter at an in-yer-face (literally) masturbation joke.
The venerable matrons were out in force again at the Almeida for Nicholas Wright’s new play, Mrs Klein. Where does Wright get his ideas from? A hat, probably. He likes historical settings involving tangled family relationships and large doses of mother-love. Previously he’s written about van Gogh in Brixton, about a gay journalist in the 1960s, and now, let’s see what it says on this scrunched-up bit of paper? Ah, a pioneer of psychoanalysis named Melanie Klein.
OK, let’s prepare for a historical account of Freudianism. Oh, but wait a minute. Let’s wait 60 minutes, in fact. Mr Wright is about to start writing and he’s such a flabby and wasteful wordsmith that he spends quarter of an hour telling us how Mrs Klein hired a typist. He then proceeds, in his languid and artless manner, to twiddle his thumbs for another 40 minutes while the plot emerges despite all his attempts to stop it. Mrs Klein’s son has died. Her daughter, also a psychoanalyst, believes he killed himself. Will Mrs Klein discover the truth?
The first act is so sluggish and trivial that several spectators bailed out at the interval and were denied the opportunity to discover that the second act was slightly less sluggish and trivial. Anyone expecting a history of Freudianism, with all its bitter rivalries and cataclysmic schisms, was disappointed. Wright focuses on the predicament of a therapist whose daughter has followed her into the profession. There are lots of words, lots of emotions and the odd burst of hysterics. Just occasionally, like a mole fumbling for air, a joke gropes up through the soil and pokes its shiny black nose into the sunlight. When Mrs Klein tips a bottle of Chardonnay over her daughter she is chastised for ‘symbolically drowning her in urine’.
The play’s analysis of analysis is exquisitely painful. Freudian practitioners seem to be a set of pompous, doctrinaire, narcissistic depressives who pose as scientists in order to meddle in each other’s sufferings. Far from resolving emotional difficulties, they act like angst-brokers, problem-peddlers, trauma-farmers busily fertilising the crop they’re pretending to exterminate.
Clare Higgins is extremely watchable as the peppery old stick, Mrs Klein, and it’s a pleasure to see her give a down-to-earth performance rather than unleash another Wagnerian thunderstorm as one of the monumental Attic martyrs she’s so well known for playing. Tim Hatley has created a set like a beautifully detailed miniature, which captures the turgid oppressiveness of pre-war décor. For some reason the stage has been set on a steep rake which would tilt all the furniture over if the legs of the chairs and tables hadn’t been measured and cropped by an expert carpenter. Vast quantites of professional care have been expended to make everything look flat. Just like the play. The moral here seems to be that the more therapy you buy the more miserable you get. And if there’s an analyst in the family, call the men in white coats.
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