THE WORLD'S BIGGEST DIAMOND. To 26 November.

London

THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DIAMOND
by Gregory Motton

Royal Court (Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) To 26 November 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 4pm
BSL Signed 22 Nov
Runs 1hr 30min No interval

TICKETS: 020 7565 5000
www.royalcourttheatre.com
Review: Timothy Ramsden 15 November

Intense, poetic drama given a superb production and first-rate performances.
Gregory Motton, creator of dark, brief and enigmatic dramas, is back with a play uniting his earlier qualities with an enriched realism built round a love both bitter and intense. It forms one point on a dramatic triangle with Pinter’s Betrayal and Strindberg’s Dance of Death, while differing greatly from both, being more high-tension than Pinter while, unlike Strindberg, binding hatred tightly to love.

Motton’s Mr Smith (both an Everyman and a particular individual) shows the arrogance and obsession of love. He cannot, as his lover says, understand other people are more complex than the selves they present to him. And he’s dying. Love’s cruelty is clear when she states a difference between them is that she has 20 years to live. An estimate (she’s 13 years younger) but also the coldest fact of life, the essential division between living and dying thrown in the face of human nature.

“This is chaos,” he says, and whatever the precise reference it spreads to the 30 years she’s been married to Gareth Thomas, whose presence at Smith’s sea-swept old home (the waves of Emma Laxton’s soundscape increasingly crash towards the stormy end) is detected only as an ironic sound effect when he flushes the lavatory at a key point in the onstage relationship.

Motton’s language is aptly crystalline, phrases with concentrated impact (“that charnel-house look in your eyes”) expressing emotional intensity throughout. Simon Usher’s production matches it, with 2 splendid performances. Jane Asher’s elegance holds the flame-haired memory of youth, while she manages beautifully the shift from reactive character to presenting an independent view. Michael Feast magnificently incorporates physical debility – the staggering, hunched, pained figure – within decades-old emotional twistings. Feast uses his voice’s low register with devastating impact and amazing flexibility, expressing intensity through biting off a cadence, or leaping suddenly to a high register that’s both surprise and hurt.

Very few endings have such quiet physical expressiveness of the loving, warring couple finally embrace and kiss, then sit apart, silent, she looking from him to the room, he staring at the log-fire as if seeing no end to this mortal agony.

Mrs Thomas: Jane Asher
Mr Smith: Michael Feast

Director: Simon Usher
Designer: Anthony Lamble
Lighting: Simon Bennison
Sound: Emma Laxton
Company voice work: Patsy Rodenburg

2005-11-16 12:20:49