AUNT DAN AND LEMON To 27 June.
London.
AUNT DAN AND LEMON
by Wallace Shawn.
Royal Court Theatre (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs) To 27 June 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30 Mat Sat 3.30.
Audio-described 20 June 3.30pm.
Captioned 16 June.
Post-show talk 3 June.
Runs 1hr 50min No interval
TICKETS 020 7565 5000
www.royalcourttheatre.co.uk
Review: Carole Woddis 27 May
More ambiguous self-revelations.
The Wallace Shawn season progresses. It is an extraordinary tribute to this contentious American writer-actor. Sitting back after three exposures of his work – The Fever, his latest, Grasses of a Thousand Colours and now a revival of possibly his most admired play, Aunt Dan and Lemon – a disturbing view begins to develop.
All three start similarly, addressing the audience directly as if inviting collusion. In all three Shawn is working material self-confessedly based in his own background. It makes for a queasy combination. On the one hand, Shawn appears to want us to see him as the conscience of the American/western liberal intelligentsia; on the other he is asking us to make the distinction between his self-exploratory self and the material he is producing.
It’s a distinction not always successfully made. It didn’t work in Grasses of a Thousand Colours. And Aunt Dan and Lemon, premiered at this theatre in 1985 (and revived at the Almeida in 1999 with Miranda Richardson as Aunt Dan) is no less uncomfortable viewing, touching as it does on the thrill of the forbidden, whether to do with sex or unpalatable views in relation to the Nazis and the preservation of `our way of life’.
Is there any such thing as compassion, Shawn disturbingly asks through the anorexic Lemon (Jane Horrocks) at the end of the play. And more subtly, if not entirely convincingly, is there such a thing as over-exposure to exciting personalities in childhood? They can leave a malign mark.
I’d feel more persuaded of Shawn’s argument if he didn’t resort to melodrama. Director Dominic Cooke, however, makes sure the evening carries its own sense of thrill, opening and closing the play with lights full up and inflicting a voyeuristic electricity to the central episode – Aunt Dan’s lurid account of a sexual adventure that ended in murder and her subsequent short lesbian affair with the young woman involved. In the end it almost becomes an ode to moments not pursued, intimacies not experienced. I say `almost’ because nothing in Shawn is ever that clear-cut. He is forever the purveyor of equivocation and ambiguity.
Lemon: Jane Horrocks.
Mother: Mary Roscoe.
Father: Paul Chahidi.
Aunt Dan: Lorraine Ashbourne.
Mindy: Scarlett Johnson.
Andy: Martin McDougall.
Freddie: Ryan McCluskey.
Marty: Trevor White.
Raimondo: René Zagger.
Flora: Rebecca Faulkenberry.
June: Holly Goss.
Jasper: Nathan Osgood.
Director: Dominic Cooke.
Designer: Lizzie Clachan.
Lighting: Jon Clark.
Sound: Christopher Shutt.
Dialect coach: Penny Dyer.
Movement: Liz Ranken.
Assistant director: Bill Buckhurst.
Aunt Dan and Lemon was first performed at the Royal Court Theatre on 22 August 1985; it opened at the Public Theatre, New York, in October of that year.
2009-05-31 14:08:46