REVIEW: Lesere, Jermyn Street Theatre ✭✭

Lesere

Jermyn Street Theatre

14/07/15

2 Stars

The Jermyn Street Theatre is an intimate space well suited to the presentation of thrillers, and blessed now with air-conditioning as well; so in these summer months claustrophobia and confinement can be restricted to the psychological rather than physical. Until August it hosts Lesere, a new play by Ashley G Holloway, divided into two acts, set in the round, and for three players.

We open to a sparsely furnished interior suggestive of the 1920s and with vines apparently growing successfully in the lighting rig. Jane (Cassandra Thomas) and John (Leon Williams) are a married couple living frugally in the French countryside after the First World War. The opening exchanges are light and domestic, but as each of them leaves the stage they are possessed by shivers, headaches and other disturbing physical symptoms redolent of recent psychological trauma. This is clearly going to be a play in which memories of the war loom large, and where a gap will increasingly emerge between polite surfaces and darker personal memories. For all the evident enjoyment and release that the couple experience in the rituals of agricultural life and – for Jane – in writing poetry, there is an undertow of evasion and escapism about this idyll, underscored literally by ominous sound effects reminiscent of distant shell-fire. We learn that Jane comes from a prosperous family but served as a nurse on the Western Front and that John was an army officer on the Somme, who was captured.

Into this scenario and played out over the course of one day comes a third mysterious, interloper, George Darbridge (Richard Atwill). He stumbles into the house wearing full evening dress, and with an injured hand, which he asks Jane to dress for him. It turns out he is staying at a nearby inn researching a novel, and that he too had war experiences he would rather forget, as well as a French wife who has recently died in the epidemic of Spanish influenza. He possesses an importunate manner, and begins both to question Jane on her past and John’s war career, and also to raise questions about the integrity and honesty of their relationship. At the end of this scene he manages to leave with Jane’s private poetry journal, which provides him with enough material to engage in the same exercise of sowing doubt when he returns later in the day to introduce himself to John. By the interval he has so thoroughly gained an ascendancy over the couple that he compels them to dress up for a mock dinner in their own home where each course will become a truth-telling exercise determined by himself. This pattern dictates the course of the second half, where each ‘course’ is accompanied by the finest of wines, but turns out to be a sequence of ever more dismaying revelations, which force us to rethink entirely what we believe we have learned and observed of the couple at the centre of the drama.

The play as a whole is quite instructive about the nature of creating theatrical suspense, but not always in a way that reflects credit on the author. Holloway states in the programme that ‘if you really want to shine a light on something, put it in the dark first.’ If by this he means that the impact of the final revelations in any thriller depends mainly on the way in which the themes are set up, and the game of ‘bait and switch’ played with the audience’s expectations, then who could disagree? But this plan is not really executed here. In a Hitchcock screenplay, for example, or in a classic such as Sleuth, the audience does not realize the extent to which larger assumptions and leaps of understanding are disguised by the little steps which we swallow as unexceptionable – the real skill lies in drawing the audience in very gradually and consensually into the skeins of plot through a lot of minor-scale plausibility. Crucially this is largely missing here. In the first half George is simply too rude, crassly insensitive and crude in his techniques of insinuation to command credibility. It is hardly conceivable that any couple, even one as conventionally passive and politely English as this one, would have given house-room to such a bumptious bully; that they would not have compared notes in between his visits and rumbled his pretensions. As a result the first half does not carry conviction, and the revelations that follow, for all the acting skill involved in their demonstration, fail to have the shock value intended. The likelihood of personality damage from the war has been flagged too often and too early to surprise us and George is not convincing as some kind of avenging angel of justice whose conduct can be justified in the service of a larger truth. The play makes many a nod in the direction of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, without displaying the craftsmanship that old warhorse possesses.

The cast all work hard, perhaps too hard, with this material. Both Thomas and Williams have a journey to make from polished exterior comedy of manners through to fraught and wracking emotional confrontation. Here the skill lies in letting the cracks show in the façade very gradually and both are adept in doing this. When the final scenes allow them the chance to really let go and open up to the emotional truths of the past that they have tried to repress, they seize the initiative with gusto. However, it is not their fault that this comes over more as a technical success than an emotive experience for the audience. They have been just too accepting of socially implausible situations to reap the pay-off in terms of the trust and empathy of the audience. Atwill has an even more difficult task in a role that is part Mephistopheles and part Inspector Goole. He brings a great deal of energy and physical dynamism to the part of George, but the writing does confer on him the right to expose one ‘big slathering hound of a memory’ after another. He looks and acts like a character who has leapt off the poster from a Victorian melodrama, and we cannot care about him or the cause of truth he purports to espouse.

In terms of lighting, set, costumes, sound and design the creative team led by director Donnacadh O’Briain do a very solid job, alongside the cast. But the professionalism of the production cannot make up for the fact that an interesting concept and scenario does not find a convincing, sustained realisation in the writing.

Lesere runs at Jermyn Street Theatre until 1st August 2015