DIMETOS. To 9 May.
London.
DIMETOS
by Athol Fugard.
Donmar Warehouse To 9 May 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 2.30pm
Audio-described 25 April 2.30pm (+ Touch Tour 1.30pm)
BSL Signed 16 April 7.30pm.
Captioned 20 April.
Runs 2hr 10min One interval.
TICKETS: 0870 060 6624 (no booking fee).
www.donmarwarehouse.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 28 March.
A play more engineered than alive.
Donmar boss Michael Grandage has been criticised for programming Madame de Sade in his Donmar West End season at Wyndhams. But the real no-no Donmar assignment this year goes to Douglas Hodge with this dead-in-the-water Athol Fugard piece.
Playwrights can get away with a lot. But not with overly admiring a character. Ibsen gave his mouthpiece Thomas Stockman, in An Enemy of the People, personal foibles, testing his wife’s patience, and a dangerous authoritarian edge. What rankles with John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger is less Jimmy Porter’s moral self-certainty than the way the women in his life so admire him.
And what makes Dimetos unbearably tedious is, principally, that the eponymous South African engineer in rural retreat is so repeatedly asserted by those around him to be ineffably wonderful. It saps their personal vigour as he’s treated like a walking god on earth: Dimetos the visionary, as well as engineer. Only he can save the city he’s left behind. He’s done wonders for the locals where he lives. It’s sickening.
He’s found to have feet of sexual clay, causing a death. But, years on, no-one actually blames him. They still follow him about, or track him down. The guilt’s internalised, making the piece seem yet more self-absorbed.
Fugard never makes Dimetos convincing as an engineer. After an opening scene, which contains more action than the rest of the play together, with Dimetos directing the rescue of a horse through a knowledge of knots that would have made him an instant Sixer in the Scouts, there are a couple of speeches about the six basic forces in Mechanics which would suggest in a modern play several minutes on Wikipedia, and which in their second, frenzied occurrence even the excellent Jonathan Pryce cannot make convincing.
Like Anne Reid’s Sophia, Pryce does everything possible, while Holliday Grainer rather single-mindedly presents youthful hero-worship suddenly running into the buffers, and Alex Lanipekun sketches a general sense of admiration. But don’t blame any actor – or Hodge’s firm attempts to bring life to the evening. When it comes to the problems here, the play’s the thing.
Lydia: Holliday Grainger.
Dimetos: Jonathan Pryce.
Sophia: Anne Reid.
Danilo: Alex Lanipekun.
Director: Douglas Hodge.
Designer: Bunny Christie.
Lighting: Ben Ormerod.
Sound: Carolyn Downing.
2009-03-30 13:13:58