Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Cause Célèbre
Old Vic Theatre Spring 2011
The Terrence
Rattigan centenary continues with this 1977 drama, inspired by an actual
1935 case of a married woman and her much younger lover accused of
murdering her husband.
Like all Rattigan's plays, it is really about the inherent British
incapacity for dealing with passion, with the playwright this time quite
ambitiously attempting to look at it from multiple angles.
Thea Sharrock's new production is in many ways superior to the 1977
original, though it is still only partly successful. Where it is good,
it is very good, and where it doesn't succeed you will just sense
something missing - something, I suspect, that the author himself didn't
provide.
While telling the story of the murder and the court case that followed,
Rattigan invents the parallel second drama of a member of the jury, an
unhappily married sex-hating woman with a son the age of the
co-defendant whose first explorations of his sexuality offend and
frighten her.
She naturally has an absolute hatred for the adulteress and a fear of
the moral and sexual chaos she seems to represent, and her story is one
of facing and wrestling with that prejudice and fear.
(There is, in a sense, a third plot line in the courtroom drama, with
the opposing barristers amiably playing the game of scoring points and
showing off, and for much of the second act we are diverted from the
drama by this polished light entertainment.)
Anne-Marie Duff takes the very brave step of introducing the
defendant-to-be as a flighty, flirtatious airhead who enters the affair
with the young handyman without any thought of consequences or anything
else beyond the immediate gratification.
We understand, then, how after the murder she is broken as much by the
forced realisation that this is real life and not a game as by anything
else, and the risk the actress took of losing our sympathy at the start
pays off as she wins it all back.
What Duff doesn't show us is what went on in between.
One of Rattigan's main points, stated repeatedly in the play, is that a
May-December affair is not a matter of the elder debauching the
innocent, but of the younger having the power of desirability over the
elder. But we never really see it.
Part of that, as I suggested, is the playwright's fault, as he shows us
only one brief scene of the lovers together. But that means that he
leaves it to the actress to fill in the gap, and while Duff gives us a
woman sobered and even broken by her experience, she doesn't show us the
lover in thrall to her passion or need.
As the juror, Niamh Cusack is given the same challenge, as the author
clearly delineates where she is at the beginning and the end but doesn't
spell out the journey for her.
But Cusack is more successful in connecting the dots, giving the woman a
strength of character even in the depth of her repression and prejudice
that makes believable her capacity to see herself and cope with what she
discovers.
Richard Clifford and Nicholas Jones as, respectively, prosecutor and
defence barrister, make the most of their big scene, and Lucy Robinson
has strong moments as a friend of the juror who never transcends her
prejudices.
Thea Sharrock's staging is fluid - the play was originally conceived for
radio, and jumps around a lot - though it has one odd feature. Though
there are token sets, for most of the action she lines her actors up
across the front of the stage facing forward and addressing their lines
to us.
At worst, this has the feel of the kind of schools production in which
the kids are encouraged to shout at the back wall of the auditorium; at
best, it gives the play a cool, almost Brechtian distance that
frustrates our desire to get emotionally closer to the characters.
Gerald Berkowitz
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