The meaning of life is put on trial in this gripping two-hander
The Sunset Limited
Boulevard Theatre, London W1 ★★★★★
For a theatre born in the beating heart of Soho, amid the throb of the residual red-light area, the Boulevard is showing a surprising predilection for death over sex.
First this luxuriantly chic venue, which opened in October last year, offered us Ghost Quartet, a cycle of loosely related melancholy morbid songs. Now it is presenting the UK premiere of The Sunset Limited, a 2006 play by Cormac Mccarthy that is as bleak and midwintry as anything by Samuel Beckett. An attempted suicide is its starting point; thereafter it ponders the value of going on.
This should be of no surprise to admirers of the 86-year-old’s awardwinning books. Whether in a desolate post-apocalyptic America in The Road, or the violence-riven Us-mexico borders of 1850 in Blood Meridian, he is drawn to darkness. His characters move through arduous landscapes but tacitly decline the invitation to connect with the material world. There’s a quality of detachment to the characters that emits a strange, ethereal chill.
The Sunset Limited is like a distillation of Mccarthy’s comfortless conception of mankind’s apparent meaninglessness. All the same, the two-hander is a pros and cons piece: is the game worth the candle? Might God exist? The stage becomes a debating chamber where life itself is at stake.
A white college-professor type (Jasper Britton) is rescued from jumping on to a New York subway track by a black Good Samaritan (Gary Beadle) and brought to the latter’s tenement room. One is called White, the other Black – as if this were an abstract encounter, like a chess game.
They’re inevitably racially representative types: the privileged male who wants to chuck it all in, versus the former prisoner who has acquired the religious faith that we’re here for a reason, and pits that against the other’s atheistic futility (“Western civilisation finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau”).
It could be deathly, interminable, but the dialogue has a surprising lightness of touch. Black is no simpleminded spiritual optimist – his astute comebacks have a gunslinger’s velocity. Terry Johnson’s production, its design affording a mystical vista on to innumerable fire escapes and punctuated by urban rumbles and sirens, makes this meeting of minds drip with sadness and tenderness.
Britton looks so washed out, it’s as if he’s half in the morgue, drained of vitality, squinting in sceptical scrutiny. Beadle – a face from Eastenders – combines a kindly quizzicality with a sense that Black’s resolve to keep this lost soul under his care is imbued with self-interest, as if his world-view depended on it.
Given the war of words about white privilege and the prevailing mood of separatism and pessimism, there’s something gripping and valuable about Mccarthy’s devotion of stage time to a shared contemplation of the human condition across a symbolic divide. Recommended.