THREE WOMEN. To 7 February.

London.

THREE WOMEN
by Sylvia Plath.

Jermyn Street Theatre To 7 February 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 4pm.
Runs 50min No interval.

TICKETS: 020 7287 2875.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 January.

Staging shows what a good radio play this is.
Plathian completists will love this; her 1962 radio verse play revived on stage, putting Plath in the unlikely role of West End playwright. Others might want to consider that for their money there’s barely more than three-quarters of an hour’s work.

The account of three women going through pregnancy to birth, miscarriage or adoption, it interweaves images from nature and the urban world, through colours – white, blue, yellow, red – and through striking perceptions. One character notes how flat men look, another talks of her shape as like a mountain, all as part of the interplay of love and agony.

Sometimes people say a stage play that has little physical action is really a radio play, but that doesn’t seem the essential dividing-line. The question is whether what’s said is aided by the actors’ physical presence and their facial expressions. Here these often seem intrusive. Designer Lucy Read, with lighting designer Van Wei have created an elegantly anonymous room with three chairs, director Robert Shaw incorporates a moving use of a garment that rolls up as foetus before being opened out as a new-born baby.

But the introduction of movement for little reason other than to provide visual variety – or even for such ‘realistic’ touches as a mother looking through a window to where the new-born babies lie – interferes with, rather than enhancing the poetry.

And while the three performers in this production by Inside Intelligence theatre company speak clearly, they do not give a sense of commanding the verse. There are sudden short expressive bursts where the language becomes deliberately functional. But the expression of feelings, which are the core of the work, are too often generalised within the appropriate emotion.

What’s lacking here is the sense of experience reflected in thought-through words. The result is the performances too often become like verse recitals rather than being individually characterised. Staging the play means the performances have to look, as well as sound, lived-in. They come over here as pleasant recitals divorced from experience, facial expressions often generalised depictions of moods or unnecessary underlinings of what the words already make clear.

The Wife: Elisabeth Dahl.
The Secretary: Tilly Fortune.
The Student: Lara Lemon.

Director: Robert Shaw.
Designer: Lucy Read.
Lighting: Van Wei.

2009-01-08 00:12:08