WHAT THE NIGHT IS FOR.
London
WHAT THE NIGHT IS FOR
by Michael Weller
Comedy Theatre
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Wed & Sat 3pm Sun 4pm
Runs 2hr 20min One interval
TICKETS 020 7369 1731
Review Timothy Ramsden 3 December
The programme reproduces the same full-page colour picture of Gillian Anderson three times. Its designers clearly know what the priorities are here.Suppose Schnitzler's sexual carousel had stopped revolving and one couple glimpsed in La Ronde hung around to occupy the whole evening. You'll have some idea of the scenario here.
Starting with a meal a deux in her hotel room equivalent of the Viennese hotels' chambre separee for liaison-doing couples it moves, as Tim Hatley's set waltzes round, from table to bed. Two into-midlfe old flames re-meet, 'not really by chance' as The King and I put it, and try to reheat things between each other.
She's at a Conference, seemingly competent, calm and happily married to a bicycle millionaire. He, having missed a relationship with her years ago, appears after something solid now.
Schnitzler knew what he was doing when he kept his encounters brief. Michael Weller's two-hander forces him into an old-fashioned dramatic onion-stripping exercise, layers of apparent reality peeling away to reveal different levels below for subsequent stripping off.
It's not so easy to do. When every reality becomes the new unreality, the whole game can lose credibility. When two people meet for only one (beneath it all) thing, either they get it together or one walks out. Weller hedges bets and ends up offering both. And the sex is postponed, by means more or less preposterous, until we're gone for the interval.
Some objections come fairly from characters' psyches and circumstances. Melinda's situation makes her increasingly vulnerable, and Weller generally convinces as he wheels her through 180 degrees. Others seem fortuitous, or contrived. Worst of all is the room's errant clock-radio which manages to chime in more often than is natural, to disruptive effect.
In many ways, Weller's script is a very professional lesson in playwriting. Nothing's out of place, or unaccounted for. But its perfect patterning doesn't have much to say: an idea all dressed-up with nowhere much to go, forced out on a night-long stroll.
You could hardly do this with two better companions: Gillian Anderson, her frequent gestures at first blocking off emotional advances, sat side-on to Adam, body stiffening a warning, it turns out, of that emotional vulnerability. And Roger Allam's architect ever eager to advance into her life until he faces an all-or-none decision: with the gates open before him he has only the open door as alternative when dawn approaches. Allam's more forced than Anderson, though there's more compacted in his performance. But, in both cases, the actor is contending with, rather than expressing, the character.
Melinda Metz: Gillian Anderson
Adam Penzius: Roger Allam
Director: John Caird
Designer: Tim Hatley
Lighting: Paul Pyant
Sound: Rich Walsh
2002-12-10 15:03:17