I AM MY OWN WIFE.
London
I AM MY OWN WIFE
by Doug Wright
Duke of York’s
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 50min One interval
TICKETS: 0870 060 6623
Review: Timothy Ramsden 16 November
A one-off to be taken in by any serious theatregoer.
Doug Wright’s one-man play shows us Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who conducts us round her remarkable museum containing Germany’s equivalent of late Victoriana, all 23 rooms of it. Clocks and early gramophones (too early for discs, these all play rolls) abound, gradually emerging on huge shelves behind the set thanks to David Lander’s lighting. Wright’s play emerged from multiple hours interviewing Charlotte, ultimately being shown her basement treasure, a recreation of Berlin’s Mulack-Ritze cabaret.
For a whole act, Jefferson Mays remarkably recreates Charlotte herself for us. Or rather, himself. Charlotte was born Lothar Berfelde in 1928. A taste for danger is evident in the photo of him aged 10, beaming on a park-bench with a couple of young lions by his side. At 15 he took up women’s clothing and never looked back till his/her death in 2002. Charlotte was gay, without being camp or queer. (S)he should have been a woman so decided to dress and behave as one, doing so in repressive, anti-gay Nazi Berlin and Communist East Berlin.
Her delight in the late 19th century artefacts is as natural as this gender conviction. It made the real Charlotte loved in her later years in Germany, and Mays’ expert performance – as unshowy and lived-in as the lady herself – makes us love her too. So when the show closes with Charlotte’s recorded voice repeating Mays’ words from the opening, it’s like hearing a friend thought lost forever.
But, by the interval it does seem there’s little more to say about the private life of a transvestite, however magnificently performed. Wrong. For the tougher second act opens up the controversy that put Charlotte on chat-shows and encouraged her late-life self-exile to Sweden. Complicity with state security, and the nature of that complicity, benignly explained by Charlotte, build a more complex figure. Yet she preserves her demure manner talking about all this. Mays expertly contrasts Charlotte’s quiet, steady voice with excitable moments as American newsmen, an awful German chat-host and Charlotte’s imprisoned friend. Moises Kaufman’ impeccably unfussy direction combines a basic forward-moving pulse with plenty of time for each moment to breathe.
Performer: Jefferson Mays
Director: Moises Kaufman
Designer: Derek McLane
Lighting: David Lander
Sound: Andre J Pluess
Costume: Janice Pytel
Associate director: Susan Lyons
Assistant lighting: Felix Oehl
Associate sound: Josh Bender Dubiel
2005-11-17 10:47:36