Law’s flawed obsession, fuelled by possession
Obsession Barbican ★★★✩✩
EVERYTHING ABOUT this Toneelgroep Amsterdam adaptation of Luchino Visconti’s 1942 film noir screams must-see. It stars a burly Jude Law as drifter Gino who falls for Halina Reijn’s Hanna, the neglected and sometimes bullied wife of much older bar owner Joseph, played by the gritty Gijs Scholten van Aschat.
And it’s directed by Ivo van Hove whose cool, pared-down aesthetic (always with designer Jan Versweyveld) strips even classic plays of fusty detail. This one takes over the Barbican’s vast stage with a shadowy, cubist design full of sharp right-angles and great blank surfaces on to which video close-ups of Law and Reijn’s faces and bodies are projected.
The plot, which is taken from the sexually-charged novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, is more about possession than obsession. The lovers — once rid of Joseph — each have their own irreconcilable visions for their future.
Joseph’s stripped down truck engine is suspended menacingly above the stage and comes into its own when first Gino manfully fixes it, and then later for two fatal car journeys. Law transmits a kind of alpha-male innocence and, as Hanna, Reijn morphs from victim to manipulative perpetrator. But lacking a certain chemistry, it’s a relationship that, like that engine, generates more exhaust than steam.
Style comes across much more strongly than any sense of place or psychological torment. And, perhaps deliberately, workman-like English dialogue by playwright Simon Stephens is prosaic to the point of being dull.
Not a don’t-see by any means. But not a must-see either.
Consent Dorfman ★★★★✩
IF YOU love David Mamet you’ll adore Nina Raine. No other British dramatist gets close to the American master’s use of rude wit to explore themes of genuine heft. Raine’s new play — directed with a subtle but sure hand by Roger Michell — is populated by clever, thrillingly articulate lawyers whose lives seem insulated from the sordid behaviour of the people they encounter in the dock.
Conspicuous among their current workload is a rape case. Defending the (unseen) accused is Edward (a terrific Ben Chaplin) who we see mercilessly cross examining the alleged victim. Prosecuting the case — not on behalf of the deeply damaged victim, but the crown, which feels like another injustice — is Edward’s friend Tim, while, at home, Edward’s wife Kitty (an equally terrific Anna Maxwell Martin) has just had a baby.
The play lays into the way crime victims are exposed by the dispassionate professionalism of the judiciary. But the main focus is on the lawyers’ home lives and the corroding relationship between the forensically minded Edward and the increasingly unloving Kitty. The cause is a past betrayal for which she doles out belated rough justice by having an affair with Tim. A parallel plot sees another couple — also friends, also lawyers — implode because of sexual betrayal.
There’s an enjoyable whiff of schadenfreude as Raine’s plot pushes the superior Edward and his peers into the kind of mire hitherto only populated by the people they crossexamine in court. Of course, it would have been intolerable if the play confirmed their view that they are a cut above most of humanity. So in that sense we end up pretty much where the early trajectory of the narrative suggests we will.
But the arguments that swirl around sexual politics here are expressed with such sophistication you feel enriched just by being in the same room as the play. And it’s bloody funny, too.