[written for The Public Reviews]
The small studio space of the Jermyn Theatre is perfectly conducive to watching Tennessee William's claustrophobic psychological play about the despair of insanity and the threat of confinement. Clare and Felice, played mesmerisingly by Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan, are brother and sister players who arrive in a cold, unknown town to deliver 'The Two-Character Play' in a decrepit theatre to an audience who may or may not be present. Their company have abandoned them with a note stating 'you and your sister are insane' - the first gesture towards the idea that things are far more sinister than they first appear.
Clare and Felice are a double-act with a troubling past which is dramatised in their play; they are left alone, confined to their house through fear of the outside world, behind a 'barricade of sunflowers'. They have been branded murderers and left with no inheritance after their mother and father have been killed or committed suicide - the reason for their death is never resolved. Catherine Cusack performs the erratic Clare with a convincing frail and hysterical demeanour; she changes from a drunk to a childish dependant to a mother, and all of these versions of her are fully realised. Paul McEwan's Felice is weak and scared one minute and vicious and sinister the next; the master-stroke, though, is his abhorrent latent violence towards and sexual persecution of Clare which is hinted at in McEwan's sinister narrowing of the eyes and hissing through gritted teeth. With Felice intimating that the two have them had played Antony and Cleopatra, and having earlier called Clare a 'castrating bitch' and 'old demented whore' and referring to their mother as 'frigid', it is a moment fraught with danger when they are left alone in the theatre at the end of the play and he pulls himself close to Clare, putting his arm around her in what seems to be more than a brotherly embrace.
This is a very different offering from something like Tennessee's Spring Storm which played at the National Theatre this summer: that play was full of young love, parental restrictions, and moral didacticism. The Two-Character Play is far more experimental in form and ambivalent in it's tone. As an audience, we aren't able to come to a quick moral judgement about these two characters who are at the same time guilty and innocent, nurturing and vicious. The situation is absurd, in a very Beckettian sense, where Clare and Felice re-enact the same play night after night, a play which becomes indistinguishable from their own lives ('this still feels like the performance of the two-character play') not least because the names of the characters they assume are the same as their own. Like Waiting for Godot, the characters in this play are doomed to repeat ad infinitum with no resolution; Felice isn't sure that even death will offer closure as Clare tries to reassure him that all things must come to an end and so their play must draw to some sort of conclusion. Ultimately the dramatic craft, performance itself, becomes a delusional form of madness where the cold reality of the stage is transformed into the summer of the deep south in the minds of Clare and Felice, so that they no longer need the protection of their coats from the icy winter.
This play is a very intriguing reflection on the dramatic form, where the players can never be sure whether they are inside or outside of the performance, where their lives are just an illusion constantly being formed and reformed by themselves as directors. But this play offers more than a reflection on the nature of theatre; Clare is thought to be based on Tennessee's own sister who suffered from poor mental health, and we can see him grappling with these personal themes to devastating effect here. This is an original, often funny, dark, and rarely performed play which shows another side to the famous playwright, and I would encourage you to catch this whilst the Jermyn Theatre are giving you the opportunity.
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