PLEASURE AND PAIN. To 21 December.
Glasgow
PLEASURE AND PAIN
by Mark Thomson, from writings by Guy de Maupassant
Citizens' Theatre Stalls Studio To 21 December 2002
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat 14 December 3pm
Runs 2hr One interval
TICKETS 0141 429 0022
Review Timothy Ramsden 30 November
More pleasure than otherwise for audiences in this glimpse of the brief glory and slow decline of a literary lion.Stories on stage: it's been done. And the dovetailing life-and-works line. But Mark Thomson's collation from late 19th century France's master of the conte progressively takes the formula further than most to produce a vivid image of life's pain released in the mind-crafted world of bourgeois sexual narratives.
First, it's the frustration of wage-slaving in a shipping-office, his line-manager scowling across his desk even at lunchtimes to prevent young Guy putting creative pen to paper. There's brief joie de vivre as fame brings freedom, mixing with fellow literary celebs. – Flaubert, Daudet, Zola – before syphilis takes increasing hold, beyond the shipping boss's wildest dream of dominance. Ether and morphine do battle but at a cost: Guy can no longer write for periods, he looks in the mirror and sees another, ghostly self in the room.
Amid these drug and disease-stoked nightmares he goes on dreaming up stories when he can, but now a character argues back. Eventually the hand that's pushed the pen is bound in a straitjacket as the illusions give way to destructive paranoid delusion.
His stories, meanwhile, flash bitingly past with an itchy 19th century French sexuality. At first, there's a sense of goodness – the dead wife who disguised her wealth for marital happiness, and his inheritance's destructive effect on her widower. They end in pure torture with a wife whose desperation to stop the agonies of factory-birthgiving makes her deny her word of honour, making her demanding husband doubt his paternity of one (unidentified) child.
John Kazek's neat Guy fizzes in all these moods, sometimes joining the others in enacting his pointed tales. He's especially vivid as the substance-sniffing, mind-crazed middle-aged writer. Lorna McDevitt brings due control to the women of middle-class France, whether icy or suddenly finding renewed relations with a husband through voyeuerism at the servant's outhouse cavortings.
As destruction looms, a giant frame swings diagonally, dividing the stage into life and works, but is too assertive for the studio space. More effective are the late discoveries of small set-pieces – a gun, a restraint jacket – that have been hanging around waiting for Guy throughout the evening.
Guy de Maupassant: John Kazek
Actor: Stephen Cavanagh
Actress: Lorna McDevitt
Director: Mark Thomson
Designer: Will Fricker
Lighting: Fleur Woolford
2002-12-03 08:25:55