TRIPTYCH. To 10 May.
London.
TRIPTYCH
by Edna O’Brien.
Southwark Playhouse Shipwright Yard Tooley Street/Bermondsey Street SE1 2TF To 10 May 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 1hr 30min No interval.
TICKETS: 0844 847 1656.
www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 April.
Passions never rise as they might.
An unseen man links the three women in Edna O’Brien’s play. His fate is decided by a fourth, who stands outside the socially-conditioned, self-destructive behaviour which restrains these three. The man himself inspires the devotion of this trio, while seeming also to have his own artistic gift.
His mistress Clarissa is an actor, playing passionate classical roles – the Duchess of Malfi, As You Like It’s Rosalind (where she seems about to go onstage for her first scene already dressed as Ganymede). His wife Pauline stalks Clarissa, practised in techniques to see-off other women.
Daughter Brandy, a would-be musician ambitious to beat her own drum (and doing so in a couple of perfunctory percussive moments), longs for her father. All this is played out in the alternative, under-the-arches space of the new Southwark Playhouse, by London Bridge station. Designer Paul Burgess makes this space resemble the long nave of a church, audience ‘pews’ along each side, wooden screens at each end with a patriarchal painted figure partly-concealed behind.
Sometimes the concept helps, giving space for swishing entrances; at others the space becomes abstract, dissipating the concentrated arguments. It adds to a curiously low-key evening. For all the declarations of yearning and desire, all the emotional gaps Henry leaves or has made in these people’s lives, the damaging impact through which he’s sailed confidently on, there remains a lack of either fury or resolution.
It’s as if the fourth, unseen woman comes as a dea ex machina to sort things out on their behalf. Yet even this doesn’t lead to any final image of the three women’s states. There’s a dispassionate quality to the acting much of the time, given what’s being expressed in the words, and it’s left to costume to express Clarissa’s protean actor’s nature, Pauline’s dowdy attempts to keep her husband, and young Brandy exposing limbs and shoulders with the confidence of a youthful body even as she’s punishing it in her turmoil.
Ultimately, O’Brien’s script has a self-conscious element that keeps a sense of contrivance, of authorial shuffling from which the characters never escape into terrifying passionate life.
Clarissa: Orla Brady.
Brandy: Jessica Ellerby.
Pauline: Terry Norton.
Director: Sean Mathias.
Designer: Paul Burgess.
Lighting: Katharine Williams.
Composer: Philip Miller.
Assistant director: Jason Lawson.
2008-04-23 08:20:24