REVIEW: The Realistic Joneses, Lyceum Theatre ✭✭✭✭

Photo: Sara Krulwich The Realistic Jonses

Lyceum Theatre

13 April 2014

4 Stars

I cannot remember the last time there was a play on Broadway which played with the form of dramatic theatre as much as The Realistic Joneses, a new work by Will Eno, which is having its premiere season on the Great White Way at the Lyceum Theatre in a production directed by Sam Gold.

It has a stellar cast: Toni Collette, Michael C Hall, Tracy Letts and Marisa Tomei. Four huge stars on the marquee must surely mean a sure fire dramatic volcano.

So you would think.

But the great strength of this play is its capacity to be entirely mundane, to deal with the trivial minutiae of daily life, while exploring the slow, creeping horror of degenerative diseases which wipe away the mind, undermine the soul.

And the great treat of the writing is that the dramatic narrative is presented in a fragmented, disjointed way which presents the linear exposition in fractured chunks. While hearing about the effects of the illness, and seeing those effects play out in the lives of the characters, the audience has its own sensory experience which makes it question what it thinks it knows or thought it heard, requires it to stop and rethink actions and reactions and which, slowly, and only with the benefit of hindsight, makes any kind of sense.

Eno ensures that to understand the misery of the disappearing mind, the audience feels like it has not being paying attention; the information is jumbled, tantalisingly unclear often, a whirlwind of perceptions and thoughts which never quite hold ground, which shudder and fade as new facts emerge.

Happily, the high calibre of the acting ensures that this dangerous game with the audience does not involve a step too far.

Each performer here is exemplary. No one has a dull moment or an off-pitch scene. Everything is played with precision, well-honed skill and a sense of greatness. The last is critical given how ordinary the lives of these people are.

Because, of course, illnesses of the mind come to everyone, great and small, and can be devastating and humiliating no matter what the station of the sufferer. Simple tasks become insurmountable obstacles - remembering how to walk can be challenging to an ill electrician just as profoundly as to a statesman.

There are two couples at the centre of the action: Colette and Letts (the Jones family) and Hall and Tomei (another Jones family). The couples seem to have nothing in common except the neighbourhood, but it soon turns out that is not quite so.

Over the course of about 100 minutes, in scenes which are short vignettes of the lives of the couples and the ways in which they entwine or come into collision, the play provides a realistic portrait of lives lived in diminishing capacity. Some scenes are horrific, some are funny, some are as awkward and uncomfortable as anything you will ever see on stage.

But all of it rings true, is realistic, as the title of the play suggests it will be.

None of the actors strives for stardom, attempts to make the play "their play" or seeks the spotlight. Each works with the others to make this difficult piece work. They are all wonderful.

As ensemble playing goes, it is hard to fault. Four crisp, clean and focused portrayals of perfectly ordinary life turned sour, relationships riven with pain and care.

Some of the passages are quite lyrical, despite their ordinariness, and it is in the overall evocation of the feel of the loss of control that comes with degenerative diseases that Eno excels.

This is a hard play to love but it is a clever and intriguing work in every way.