Neglected tale turns into a storm of emotion
Theatre The Red Barn Lyttelton, National Theatre
★★★★ ★ DAVID HARE has mounted a remarkable rescue operation. From beneath the avalanche of novels left by the prolific Belgian writer Georges Simenon – the man who gave the world Maigret – he has plucked one slim, neglected volume, The Hand (1968) and turned it into a gripping interval-free two hours of theatre.
Assisting him in his mission are whizz-kid director Robert Icke (making his NT debut in sensational style) and a cast led by the to-die-for talent of Australian actress Elizabeth Debicki (who seduced millions of viewers, as well as Tom Hiddleston, in television’s The Night Manager) and screen and stage star Mark Strong.
The essentials of the story, retained by Hare but restructured to add suspense, are simple. There’s murder, mystery and an almighty snow storm, with an investigating police officer flicking open his notepad in the cold light of day. Bearing a striking resemblance to
Mad Men’s Don Draper, the rugged Strong plays an upright Connecticut lawyer called Donald Dodd who lets go of the hand of his friend Ray, a successful advertising executive, while the pair are making their blizzardbound way home, with their wives, after a party with a rich local.
Ray perishes in the cold and the extent of Dodd’s efforts to save his pal raise questions about the nature of criminality, the fragility of the mid-life male ego and the insubstantiality of conformist affluence.
It becomes clear that Ray’s cheatedon wife Mona (played with statuesque allure and the minimal signalling of intent by Debicki) is open to overtures from Don. Is this done with the complicity of the latter’s homely, quietly controlling spouse Ingrid (a self-contained, watchful Hope Davis)? Who knows what happened in the barn outside Dodd’s house? The psychological plot thickens.
Those familiar with the novel may mourn the passing of its bitterly sour first-person narration. Strong, though, lends the anti-hero a fascinating inscrutability, a stiff understatement that makes what he does a shock, even to himself, while the women have a greater life of their own, not just butts of Dodd’s judgmentalism.
The even bigger plus lies in Bunny Christie’s astounding stage design, which discloses a range of beautifully realised period interiors (and whirling snowstorm too) with a cinematic fluidity that seems to defy logistical possibility; black screens serve as grand apertures, narrowing in on telling visuals or widening out, tracking across. Icke quickens our pulses too with an eerie soundscape.
I don’t think it ruins the occasion to advertise the fact that Debicki strips to the waist at one crucial point, summoning memories of Nicole Kidman in David Hare’s version of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, The Blue Room, a generation ago.
I suspect this adaptation possesses a similar box-office potency but its chief asset lies in its valuable rediscovery of a haunting tale and laying it bare for all to see.
Until Jan 17. Tickets: 020 7452 3000; nationaltheatre.org.uk
Strong lends the anti-hero a fascinating inscrutability that makes what he does a shock, even to himself