Sex, violence and stifled yawns
Dorfman, National Theatre, London SE1 (020-7452 3000). Until 2 March Running time: 2hrs ★
The news that Cate Blanchett was to star in a new S&M play by Martin Crimp triggered such a “box office feeding frenzy” that the National Theatre had to allocate the tickets by ballot, said Sarah Crompton on What’s On Stage. In Crimp’s play, loosely inspired by Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel Pamela, the Australian star is “Woman” – which requires her to stalk the set in underwear and simulate various sado-masochistic sex acts with Stephen Dillane (as “Man”). Alas, “sex and violence have rarely seemed so dull”. Blanchett is “terrific” as she changes voices and gets to role-play master as well as servant. She puts her all into the part. “But it isn’t enough.” The writing is simply far too opaque, pretentious, prolix and solemn to remotely engage the audience – let alone shock us.
Given the chance to see Blanchett, people have been queuing from 4am to snap up the day seats, said Ann Treneman in The Times. Yet they’d be better off having a nice lie-in. True, the acting – from Blanchett, Dillane and Jessica Gunning as a fearsome jailer figure – is superb. But that aside, this is just a tedious drama about “suburban swingers” role playing in a garage and “all dressed up with nothing much new to say”. Katie Mitchell, directing with her usual “maniacal precision”, never lets go of her desire to shock and disturb. But it’s all about as interesting as “listening to two drunk people at a bus stop shout at each other about who does most of the washing up”.
What, you may well ask, is the “narrative thrust, the philosophical cut, the dramatic point” of this show? “Search me, guv,” said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. Advance word from the previews had it that spectators were fainting of shock at the violent bits. It seems more likely they were “passing out from tedium” or from amazement that Blanchett had agreed to appear in “such a load of phooey”. It ends with Woman strapping on a huge black dildo, smearing it with lubricant and “giving Man, who is by now in female undies, what I believe is termed a ‘seeing-to’. Taxpayers of Britain, be proud that your arts subsidies are being used thus.”