DUET FOR ONE To 1 August.
Bath.
DUET FOR ONE
by Tom Kempinski.
Almeida Theatre To 14 March 2009.
now at Vaudeville Theatre To 1 August 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm.
Runs 2hr 30min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 412 4663 (booking fee).
www.duetforone.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 30 January at Almeida Theatre.
Two play beautifully in significant Duet.
At its first (1980) production, Tom Kempinski’s play about a concert violinist whose career has been ended by Multiple Sclerosis was related to English ’cellist Jacqueline du Pre. A golden cultural couple with her pianist husband (Stephanie’s is a composer) du Pre was taken as surrogate subject of the play.
The play’s premiere, it turned out, was at the mid-point between the end of du Pre’s career and her death in 1987, at 42 – coincidentally the age of Kempinski’s violinist as she visits psychotherapist Alfred Feldmann.
Matthew Lloyd’s superb Almeida revival allows a wider perspective, showing Kempinski (who had his own disabling medical condition for years) is not writing about an individual tragedy in the newspaper headline sense, but about humanity’s Tragic condition.
The play successfully infuses this within a common dramatic formula, the two-hander charting the gradual finding of respect between initially opposed characters. There’s plenty of anger, avoidance of eye contact, and physical turning away between these two, up to the last moment, where, however, the final word – without any sentimentality – is “together”.
On one level it’s Stephanie’s journey through denial, self-deception and bitterness towards life in the face of death, while Feldmann delivers his credo in the crucial penultimate scene: “The point of life is life itself”. He is the advocate of life, the only value humankind has proven in its centuries of struggle and progress. Stephanie’s early years were a struggle; now the ‘victory’ of performance has been taken from her, hatred and contempt snarl under her positive-seeming surface. Feldmann fights so the rest of her life will be more than a shadowed wait in the portico of death.
Juliet Stevenson presents each stage in Stephanie’s life with deeply marked conviction. Her energy, anger and contrasting moments of serenity talking about music become images of life itself. It’s a duet not a duel, so Henry Goodman’s Feldmann, apparently inattentive, deliberately provocative, complements Stevenson’s emotional changes, creating a discordant duet with her when he finally reveals the passion beneath his own calm. Discretely, if unnecessarily, modernised this revival shows in Duet the elemental struggle of human existence.
Dr Feldmann: Henry Goodman.
Stephanie Abrahams: Juliet Stevenson.
Director: Matthew Lloyd.
Designer: Lez Brotherston.
Lighting: Jason Taylor.
Sound: John Leonard.
Dialect coach: Julia Wilson-Dickson.
Assistant director: Poppy Burton-Morgan.
2009-02-02 11:23:40