THE SECRET RAPTURE by David Hare. Minerva Theatre, Chichester.

Chichester

THE SECRET RAPTURE

by David Hare

Minerva Theatre To 1 September 2001

Runs 2 hrs 30 minutes One interval

TICKETS 01243 781312

Review Timothy Ramsden 15 August 2001

Some strong performances give shape to Hare's dissection of eighties Britain.

Suzan Sylvester is the latest person to play the David Hare Woman. This character, a kind of secular madonna, takes the form here of Isobel. Safely ensconced in an independent business partnership, Isobel feels the full, eventually fatal, force of Thatcherism (the play came in 1988) when her father dies.

Sister Marion, a Tory minister, feels constantly shown up by Isobel's nobility and purity of spirit (remember 'madonna'). The partnership is scooped up by a company run by Marion's husband Tom, a Christian businessman. Isobel's partner Irwin is seduced by a doubled salary into accepting the take-over. He's seduced too by Rhonda, Marion's bag-carrier. Wandering through the plot is Katherine, Isobel's drunk and chaotic young step-mother.Indhu Rubasingham's production makes a fair stab at this mishmash of decency and despicableness. Sylvester has a dreamy face and a voice earthed by flavoursome vowels which help root a character whose passive Virtue is matched by her ineffectuality.

Clare Higgins could play the dreadful Marion with her eyes shut, which she's far too professional to do. Her vivid performance makes this monster seems semi-tolerable, if only because she's a real, grubby person unlike Isobel, who is less a character than a focus group fantasy. And stage monsters generally attract audiences.

Robert Morgan tries well with Tom, but the character's unconvincingly cliched Christianity provides a near-unclimbable wall of credibility. Mark Letheran does not explain how the respectable Irwin can lay his hand on a gun when the plot requires. Lara Cazalet catches Rhonda's creeping sycophancy and shallow stylishness but Niamh Linehan's Katherine suggests insanity rather than intoxication.

In this decent production of a play that promises more than it provides, we are at least spared the fey 1988 ending with the murdered Isobel wandering in a fragrant afterlife - an invention apparently of the original director, which the present one sensibly discarded.

2001-08-17 16:03:07