EDGE. To 31 January.
London
EDGE
by Paul Alexander
New End Theatre To 31 January 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Sat&Sun 3.30pm
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS: 020 7794 0022
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 January
As with Oscar Wilde, it's easy to hear too much of Sylvia Plath, but hardly of Angelica Torn's performance as the serial suicide American poet.Which literary youngsters around 1960 wouldn't have wanted to dream themselves into the position of exciting, good-looking poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Yet in 1963, Plath finally killed herself. Seven years into a sado-masochistic marriage to someone whose forging of a new nature poetry resulted in verse Sylvia condemns as self-gratifying mediocrity.
Meanwhile, Hughes had left for an overweight, talentless poetess who, seven years on (the duration of the Plath/Hughes marriage) put her own head into a gas-oven treatment.
The first half's intensity, set on Plath's final day, is dissipated post-interval by an unhappily ever after' look into the future. Yet that first part's the riveting story of an elite Bostonian student shadowed by an autocratic father, who died unnecessarily (sure the symptoms of curable diabetes spelled cancer) leaving Sylvia feeling irrationally guilty.
Torn's nervy, high-energy delivery, its rapid pattering demanding and deserving concentration, running into moments of sudden intensity or laughter signalling clamped-down hysteria, is exhilarating, through an increasingly negative narrative. Her hand keeps going to her mouth, the voice modifying, with the impact of a stage aside but never trust this person's apparent gift of confidentiality. I'm not bitter,' she keeps saying. Oh no? Just ironic, or plain unknowing.
It's vivid, if hardly the last word on Ted Hughes. But what actually lead to Sylvia's death? There's a suggested need for order in the individually elastic-banded notebooks she carries. Even her praise of Hughes' Crow seems designed to give her a much-needed control: he can be great - when she allows.
Not all the attempted suicides arose out of her time with Ted, despite his vile behaviour (and his new partner's they seemed to orchestrate their attacks on her nerves). Was she doomed by daddy's perfection-demanding gaze? Did marrying another dominant personality a Father Ted, so to speak do for her? Was it being exiled by Hughes' decision (Sylvia never consulted) to move to a remote Devon house?
Or bad timing? As sexual intercourse began freely all round her in 1963, was thirty-something Sylvia caught by her 1950s youth before feminism brought new confidence and female-support networks?
Sylvia Plath: Angelica Torn
Director: Paul Alexander
Costume Designer: Gabrielle Hamill
2004-01-18 13:33:13