Little Eyolf –Jermyn Street Theatre, London ***

[written for The Public Reviews]

Little Eyolf is one of Ibsen’s lesser known plays but it is powerful nonetheless and perhaps even more so when presented in the intimate studio space of the Jermyn Street Theatre. Echoing the fairy tale tone of the earlier play Peer Gynt, Little Eyolf has the strange mythical character of the Rat Wife intrude on the Allmers family to wreak destruction. In this way, the play is more overtly presented as a parable than Ibsen’s other works, such as A Doll’s House, which may disguise similar moral lessons with a more conventional or realistic setting.

Michael Meyer’s translation does not seek to modernise the play and this is crucial as the entire set-up of the family, the very circumstances which precipitates its destruction, are specific to the period in which it was written. Rita and Alfred are affluent and can afford to please themselves; Alfred goes off to the mountains to concentrate on writing his book, The Responsibility of Man, while his wife Rita languishes at home. Both are free to neglect their crippled son, Eyolf, as parents of their class often did. Indeed, Alfred accuses Rita of passing days without seeing Eyolf (after he suddenly decides to devote his life to the boy, realising his own responsibility as a man and father), leaving him to his aunt Asta who is the only one to show any real affection for the boy despite being the only one not duty bound to do so.

These circumstances may have been the norm but Ibsen’s play exposes the corruption at the heart of this particular family by having an outside influence reveal them to the world. The Rat Wife comes to the house asking if the family need ridding of any nuisances and it becomes obvious that both Eyolf and Asta are the nuisances which Rita would like to be rid of. In a dramatic realisation of the saying ‘be careful what you wish for’, Eyolf follows the Rat Wife into the sea and drowns as the other boys look on helplessly, leaving Rita and Alfred to contemplate the overwhelming guilt they feel. As well as guilt at their neglect of their child they also feel a sexual guilt and sexuality is presented throughout as troubling and sinful: Eyolf was crippled as a result of falling off a table when he was a baby, having been left there sleeping while Alfred and Rita made love. Even the sibling relationship between Alfred and Asta isn’t as sacred as they imagine and comes very close to corruption when Asta discovers that she and Alfred are not related. Asta must leave and accept Borgheim’s romantic advances, which she has been resisting vehemently, in order to prevent Alfred committing a sin and indulging in his love for her.

The most magnetic performance is given by Imogen Stubbs as Rita and yet there is something about her uninhibited anguish and hysteria which overpowers the play and makes it less subtle than its themes deserve. Jonathan Cullen’s Alfred is always in Stubbs’ shadow; thankfully he doesn’t try to match the fever pitch of her performance but his attempts at anger and passion only appear feeble as a response to the strenuousness of Rita’s emotions. The set was fit for purpose but I was unsure whether the bright blue walls were an intentional part of the set or just the usual décor of the playing space – whatever the intention, it was distracting and didn’t seem to fit the piece.

This play is a curiosity; with the strange Rat Wife and the horror of the death of a child at its centre, it is almost macabre. It peels back the layers of the closed domestic scene to reveal something disquieting and corrosive underneath. Ultimately the resolution of the play feels unsatisfactory, especially as Stubbs’ Rita has been played as so fervently jealous and uncompromising. It perhaps stretches credibility to think that she will devote her life to bettering those of the poor children who live nearby. This performance is muscular in its interrogation of the selfishness of humanity but bleak in the way it punishes people for that selfishness without offering much in the way of redemption.

Runs until 28th May

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The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams – Jermyn Street Theatre ****

[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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