Lloyd Evans
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In My Name
Trafalgar Studios
All Nudity Shall Be Punished
Union
Uh oh. Writers writing about writers writing. Amy Rosenthal’s new play is set in 1916 in a Cornish village. D.H. Lawrence, suffering from writer’s block, has suggested to the publisher John Middleton Murry and his lover Katherine Mansfield, who is also blocked, that they rent adjoining cottages. This promises to be a meagre, literary love-in but the play succeeds extremely well, even for a sceptic like me who remains unconvinced by Lawrence’s obese sentiment-laden novels. (My preference is for the eerie, formless and completely masterful late poems like ‘The Mosquito’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’). The show’s centrepiece is Lawrence’s krakatoan relationship with his German wife, Frieda. They are ill-matched and yet perfectly matched. He’s as thin as a stair-rod, she’s as fat as a bus tyre. He grows vegetables and admires them, she bakes cakes and wolfs them down. He loves the attention of the Bloomsbury set. She despises him for loving their attention. He rhapsodises about creating a community based on love and creativity and she breaks a casserole dish over his head.
The storms are cyclical. Minor bickering escalates into rage, which erupts into all-in-wrestling and finally the hostility dwindles back into the warm posset of sexual reconciliation. Inevitably Mansfield and Murry seem bloodless by comparison and one deduces that their presence in Cornwall was arranged partly in order to invigorate the Lawrences’ marriage with a frisson of exhibitionism. Lawrence chases Frieda around the stove shouting, ‘Come here, thou glorious Brünnhilde, thou Teutonic monument, thou luscious Hunwife,’ while Murry and Mansfield, white-faced and tight-lipped, retreat to their room to enjoy Keats and sardines in bed.
There are numerous perils with staging this sort of material — parody, irrelevance, pretentiousness and absurdity — but Rosenthal avoids all such traps. Just about. Tracy-Ann Oberman manages to make the silly, big-bosomed, cake-scoffing Frieda both believable and likeable. And Ed Stoppard confidently enlists our sympathies. It’s a great help that D.H. Lawrence belongs to that small group of notorieties (the others are Lenin, Jesus and Santa Claus) whom any man can be made up to look like. With his neat dark beard and haunted face he stomps about the cottage mesmerising both households with his intellectual games, crackpot schemes and snatches of rhapsodic philosophy. What a strange mixture he was. Bully, sex maniac, Leveller, poet, polemicist, horticulturalist and revolutionary. Had he lived now he might have become a messianic cult leader. The play is richly textured and works as biography, as an examination of the creative spirit and as a snapshot of England during the first world war. It’s also a sermon on the perils of marrying authors and, above all, a very funny neighbours-from-hell sitcom. If you found yourself on holiday with these posturing hysterics you’d be on your way home after exactly two and a half hours. The length of the play. Nicely judged.
In My Name has just transferred to a West End studio theatre after a sell-out run at the Old Red Lion. It’s set in the immediate aftermath of the 2005 Tube bombings and the whole of London is quivering with untethered anxieties. We’re in a squalid bedsit where shelf-stacker Grim is trying to get to know his sinister new flatmate, Egg. Enter Royal an amiable free wheeler and the place suddenly bristles with competitive male loyalties. Grim suggests they watch Friends. Egg isn’t keen. ‘Should be called C***s. The comedy is nervy, nasty and truthful. Things get worse when Egg starts to show signs of paranoia. They order a takeaway and Egg kidnaps the delivery man accusing him of being an assassin. What began as an unsettling underclass comedy develops into a brutal psychological thriller. Compelling and tightly focused as it is, the play falls short in some areas. At times it’s not clear how the action relates to the events unfolding outside and in the flat upstairs. But the performances are top-notch. Kevin Watt is horribly convincing as a damaged nutcase unable to break free from his past. And Ray Panthaki, playing a needy, likeable drifter, has vast stores of charm and a natural comic grace.
At the Union there’s a Brazilian play with a great title: All Nudity Shall Be Punished. Little known over here, Nelson Rodrigues (1912–80) is one of Brazil’s most celebrated playwrights. This torrid, complex play is directed on a tiny budget by Kwong Loke using a cast of Brits and Brazilians speaking English with a variety of accents. This harms the unity of the piece. Rodrigues is certainly an interesting writer. He just needs more money thrown at him.
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