POSTCARDS FROM MAUPASSANT. To 27 September.

London

POSTCARDS FROM MAUPASSANT
by Caroline Harding from stories by Guy de Maupassant

Old Red Lion Theatre To 27 September 2003
Tue-Sun 8pm
Runs 1hr 40min One interval

Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 September

Sour billets-doux performed with soupcons of panache.Two Friends Productions (they've allowed Richard Attlee in because, in Maupassant's world, there'd be limited opportunities for sadness without sex, which means - this was still the 19th century - men and women) have titled their dramatised Maupassant contes well. Like postcards, they are colourful, brief and ultimately picturesque or grotesque.

Maupassant's own short life (1850-1893) formed a steep parabola; a rise to fame and fall into debilitating sickness. Life and works were blackly parallelled last year in the intimacyof Glasgow Citizens' Stalls Studio with David Mark Thomson's Pleasure and Pain Maupassant compilation-dramatisation. There, the stories had a blacker depth. In comparison, the Old Red Lion show is sepia.

Yet it shows tonal detail in the stories, from the first, perhaps most anecdotal. Its raucous, skirt-uplifting end in this staging brings a humour hard to relate to its own day. Marguerite (possibly named with apt irony after Faust's devoted in 19th century France's most popular opera) is in a loveless marriage when the hint of an affair revives her husband's desire for her.

But the flame's dead in her, so she takes revenge for his expensive mistresses by charging a monthly rental for her body. It's not quite the door-slam of the Helmers' doll's-house, but more than shocking for its time with its subversion of marital male rule and the notion of female wifely devotion.

Seven stories on, and loneliness plus emotional longing have made curious entries. There's a comically grotesque, yet tender, story of two rail passengers, an over-milked wet nurse and a thirsty labourer, satisfying each other's needs in strategically-placed tunnels.

The grotesque recurs. At a spa, a complacent woman taking the waters discovers her fellow-patients are physically and mentally scarred - a sawn-off finger and compulsive tics - through near-spectral happenings beyond her relatively pampered experience.

There's humour and embarrassment also, but this thread leads with logic, if not inevitability, to the graveyard and bereavement (passengers, patients, bereaved - victimhood seems engrained in the sick, tormented Maupassant's world).

Yet this is the most tender - even hopeful - story, giving an overall shape to the production. Certainly as played here, Richard Attlee's widower nervously grasping the chance of new life with Candia Gubbins' elegaically-played graveyard courtesan (not quite fair: she haunts the tombstones to strike up relationships with gentlemen of feeling and provide herself with warmth and comfort for a few months at a time).

The playing is strong, if it tends towards the comic more consistently than might seem apt for Maupassant. Gubbins, however, develops a striking depth in several characters. You can certainly see why film-makers from Ford to Ophuls, TV and theatre have found eloquent source-material in these dark stories.

Jean/Henri/Antonio/Alphonse/Marquis/Mr Rivoire/William: Richard Attlee
Marguerite/Celeste/Desiree/Marianne/Marie: Caroline Harding
Eloise/Rosa/Louise/Odette/Charlotte/Helene Masserier: Candida Gubbins

Director: Dan Milne
Designer: Keith Baker
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick

2003-09-21 13:03:40