Unenchanted evening

When the public ignores a playwright, it’s not because the public is wrong but because the playwright deserves to be ignored. Director Paul Miller and translator Clare Bayley have ‘rediscovered’ an obscure Swedish novelist, Victoria Benedictsson, who wrote one play (and it shows) and then stabbed herself in the throat. Set in Paris, The Enchantment is a feeble and self-

conscious replica of Hedda Gabler. The characters are supremely unattractive. Niamh Cusack’s Erna is a spiky shrew, Nancy Carroll’s Louise is a squashed rose petal, Hugh Skinner’s Viggo is a beaming jerk and Zubin Varla’s Gustave is a narcissistic stud bristling with clichés from the rotter’s handbook. Varla has been beamed into the wrong play. His thick black hair and beard are trimmed to the same length all over his head, which gives him the look of an over-earnest philosophy student magnetised to attract iron filings.

But he’s playing a rampant sex athlete who’s got every heiress in Paris sighing at her casement and listening for the tick of his cane on the cobblestones. And poor Nancy Carroll. With her looks, intelligence and mysterious sexual energy, she should be playing the real Hedda Gabler, not trapped in this daft act of feminist reclamation. It’s nice that the National can afford these outings, but this one is pure vanity theatre. The production is lavishly dressed and comes complete with a spooky trio of on-stage musicians who pluck and saw at various stringed weapons. Good-looking but indigestible.

A similar experiment at the Donmar, where Douglas Hodge has expended a vast effort reburying the reputation of N.F. Simpson. The longer of Simpson’s two playlets — A Resounding Tinkle and Gladly Otherwise — is set in suburbia, where a pair of Cockney cretins are expecting a delivery.