Filled with tension, this chiller thriller’s ice-cool
THERE are so many plays which depict lawyers as valiant fighters for truth that it is refreshing to find one which shows a lawyer behaving like – well, like a complete and utter lawyer.
The central character in Georges Simenon’s story La Main is a staid 1960s Connecticut attorney, Donald Dodd (Mark Strong). He has a boring job, plain wife, successful father and a maddeningly raffish best friend.
What does Donald do? He cheats. Lies. Acts in a way less honourable than he claims. Yup. Sounds like a lawyer to me.
Simenon’s story has been turned into The Red Barn, its tight script written by Sir David Hare. Sir David is known for his political work but this show is a chillerthriller and it is certainly thrillingly staged.
Robert Icke’s direction and Bunny Christie’s design lend it a modish air.
The Lyttelton theatre’s wide stage shows us, variously, a Connecticut cottage, a minimalist Manhattan apartment, a newspaper editor’s lair and a house where a cocktail party is being held.
At each set change, screens slide across from various horizontals and verticals, like the closing of a camera lens. That lends it all a voyeuristic feel. There is a ferocious snow storm. In Britain we do not often realise how dangerous such storms can be in the US. Dodd, his wife and another couple called Sanders are caught in the storm. Mr Sanders goes missing.
The show lasts for two hours without an interval, allowing the action to accrue greater tension as we see Dodd stray.
It is not exactly that he loses his moral bearings – Simenon was no moraliser – but like the man in the storm he departs from the path he knows.
He has an affair with widowed Mona Sanders ( the fabulously elegant Elizabeth Debicki). Miss Debicki, recently seen in TV’s The Night Manager, catches the cruelly careless sexiness of the beautiful.
At the early preview I saw, Mr Strong looked and sounded the part but was still working on Dodd’s slow-burn rebellion against his dull life. Hope Davis is the allseeing doormat of Dodd’s wife.
This is a ice- cool show about a coldly rapacious professional man. Modern Britain is full of them.