Penelope Wilton brings class to this sketchy chamber piece
You never see the Matisse painting that stands, covered in cloth, in the corner of the Hermitage gallery in 1956 in David Hare’s one-act chamber piece The Bay
at Nice. But you do, at the end, see its impact on Valentina, a matriarchal art expert played with signature waspish hauteur by Penelope Wilton, who has been brought in to verify its authenticity. She stands before it as though in the grip of a religious experience, joy, wonder and sorrow breaking across her face. Everything this canvas represents – freedom, sensuality, individualism – is everything she has denied herself, ever since she abandoned her arty bohemian life in Twenties Paris to return home to bring up her baby daughter. The Bay at Nice was first performed
as a double bill with Wrecked Eggs
(also by Hare) at the National in 1986. The latter has long fallen into obscurity and, despite the best efforts of Richard Eyre’s classy revival, The Bay at Nice remains very much a sketch rather than a finished painting. The communist setting is a bit of a fig leaf, too: a canvas of convenience that serves mainly to throw Hare’s long-running concerns with personal freedom, social responsibility and artistic expression – that question of how to live a free life alongside the restrictions and demands of family, society and country – into sharper relief.
The real prism here is the fraught mother-daughter relationship. For Valentina’s dowdy, now adult daughter Sophia has abruptly decided to abandon her dutiful marriage to an ambitious party member for an apolitical model aircraft enthusiast. She needs her mother’s support to divorce her husband, but the formidably disciplined Valentina, who long ago gave up any faith in love, ruthlessly and bitterly insists that by leaving her husband Sophia will only replace one set of confinements with another.
Some of Hare’s more irritating tendencies as a playwright, notably his penchant for engineering dramatic situations so that he can flaunt his erudition on a given subject, are fully on view here. At times, you wonder if he wrote The Bay at Nice primarily so that he could show off how much he understands Matisse: Valentina, who briefly studied under the artist, waxes at length to Sophia’s lover Peter about Matisse’s fascination with the whole, the way his paintings of the female form make one think instantly of bed. In dramatic terms, the play also stalls: what conflict there is lies entirely within the smooth verbal arguments; nothing actually happens.
Yet it’s also undeniably enjoyable, not least thanks to Ophelia Lovibond (of W1A fame), who oozes frustrated, misdirected rebellion as Sophia; and to Wilton (a bit wobbly on press night but no matter), who relishes every barbed flick of Valentina’s acid
Until May 4. Tickets: 0844 871 2118; tickets.telegraph.co.uk