REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED OVER 4 HOURS!
THE last time I saw this play I was in it at school. A good friend, who has gone on to become a successful actor, was strangled by the Crown Prince of Lesotho (now the king). I had to settle for third villager.
Even so, the experience left me unusually curious to find out what Tony Kushner had done with this weird and deeply sinister drama, here starring Lesley Manville as a billionairess returning to exact revenge in the small town where she grew up.
Hugo Weaving, from The Matrix and The Lord Of The Rings, plays Manville’s former lover in the play, written in 1956 by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt. It’s usually understood to be about moral reparations after World War II. But Kushner, best known for his eight-hour AIDS epic Angels In America, has turned it into an examination of the post-war U.S., selling its soul to the devil via debt-based consumerism.
Kushner loves the sound of his own voice and, to be fair, I quite like it, too. Which is lucky, as he’s added more than an hour and a half to Durrenmatt’s two hours, shoehorning in meditations on suffering, sexuality, money, justice, religion, progress and more. In some ways it’s a miracle it’s only three hours and 40 minutes long (luckily there are two intervals).
BUT there is some really meaty writing, with Manville’s diva firing off deliciously cruel oneliners. ‘You look like you swallowed a hat box’ was one of my favourites. However, you need to be very much wide awake and up for something deep and meaningful. Nod off and you’re lost.
My tip would be to focus on Manville’s bone- chilling turn as Claire Zachanassian. A veteran of a Hamburg whorehouse, she’s a terrifying, seven-times-married mix of Mae West and Bette Davis, saved by a rich industrialist.
She drops in to mess with the heads of the depressed (fictional) Rust Belt town of Slurry, New York. Here, even the undertaker has gone under. She offers the townsfolk $ 1 billion… on the condition that someone kills the lover who sold her out in court.
As that doomed man, who runs a struggling general store, Weaving is fascinating, although he has almost too much personality to play such a powerless victim.
Big and out of shape, his character looks more like Harvey Weinstein (the disgraced version) — he’s a derelict and pathetic figure. His job is to suck it up — which is probably why Jeremy Herrin cast a major-league actor. He brings a cart-load of charisma, and makes for a bigger sacrificial ox.
Otherwise, Herrin’s enormous production — with a cast of nearly 30 — is an epic full of portents. Four sexy pallbearers in black lace march across, above and around the stage. Two of Manville’s blinded accusers form a cackling vaudeville double act. Her brace of beefcake henchmen strum guitar and sing, menacingly, at Weaving. And the gutted carcass of a cow dangles from the ceiling.
With a soundtrack of smoky cocktail bar jazz played live, Vicki Mortimer’s set has the atmosphere of a 1950s film noir, emphasising the way that Manville has rigged fate against Weaving and the notso-good people of Slurry.
So, in the end, it’s as I remember from school: a sinister concoction that our headmaster darkly judged to be ‘great fun’.