| Fleshing out the form |
Theatr y Byd |
| Theatr Y Byd- Sex and Power at the Beau Rivage , Sherman Theatre, Cardiff , April 4, 2003 |
| Commemorating an encounter between two very different modernist writers, D.H.Lawrence and Rhys Davies, Lewis Davies' new play seems both unfashionably and unashamedly realist. James North’s simple, well-lit set declares itself on the steps of a hotel in the South of France. The back wall comprises a series of brilliantly painted blinds. The materials of a bohemian life are on view in the sketchy lineaments of a female nude to one side and a scatter of books and magazines spilling over the floor and down the steps on the other. Two figures enter from each side and the play emerges out of the passionate dance of their encounter as they explore the relationship between body and mind so neatly evoked by this set. This is a play about ideas and crammed with rich lines and meaty, chewy words – pure gifts for actors like Brendan Charleson, who excelled as the flaming, self-tortured Lawrence, Martina Messing as the sensuous, powerful Frieda, and Morgan Rhys as an intense repressed homosexual, shifting from uncomfortably tentative to offended to relaxed. Just a few minutes into the play and the characters are already pitting their values against each other. Rhys’s response to a nude of Frieda, Lawrence’s wife is uncomfortable: ‘I’ve never seen anything like them …they capture form’ Lawrence is having none of it: ‘some people believe there is nothing beneath our clothes. No cocks or cunts.’ Rhys turns back to the distanced picture: ‘the form is striking.’ This verbal sparring takes place in a liminal space the speakers and much as the set drifting on the edge of things. The comedic debate of such moments resonates in a time when the embodied theatre is set so often at a disadvantage in comparison with the form of film. I’ve been thinking about this show on and off since I saw it on its opening night, and about the pertinence of its debates about flesh and form for the theatre. So many words, a delirious flood of them - it is wonderful to see large ideas debated on stage, in Lawrentian terms, ‘fleshed out’, thought through. The twitchy quality of Rhys, the rages of Lawrence are physically affecting. This is no radio play but it would be too wordy for the screen. Davies is perceptive about the games people play with themselves as much as with others. And then the final scene is beautifully tongue in cheek, self-reflexive, sharply witty. The humour that levened the intellectual debate was earthy and verbal. There was a ripple of laughter for example when Rhys Davies summarises a gay acquaintance as ‘a recovering vegetarian’ and another when Frieda’s description of the sex in Rhys’s book as ‘repressed and guilty’ was explained away by Lawrence’s simple: ‘he’s Welsh’. Theatr y Byd should be proud of this play. Opinionated, at times awkward and a little stiff, it is also fiercely intelligent and passionate about its huge subjects: how to live, what is the function of art, what kinds of games do people play with each other. The play’s a pleasure in these days of the plastic roses of entertainment and the gritty issue-led theatre of the social conscience. |
Reviewed by: Jeni Williams |
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