A leading lady to die for in a play that ties itself in knots
Venus in Fur Theatre Royal Haymarket
This is embarrassing. Ninety minutes in the company of Natalie Dormer on stage at the Theatre Royal Haymarket and I’m her slave. She could even command me to watch (non-stop) six seasons of Game of Thrones (in which she starred as Margaery Tyrell, the Queen of the Seven Kingdoms, before being bumped off the series last year) and I, the most unpersuaded of the unconverted, would be game on.
Dormer was sensational five years ago at the Young Vic as the power-wielding Miss Julie, moving below-stairs on a mission to seduce the chauffeur, in Patrick Marber’s evergreen rewrite of Strindberg’s class-war classic. With Marber directing her here (with a beautiful set by Rob Howell), she’s sensational once more playing the mysterious Vanda, a brassy New York actress bursting with hope, confidence and much else besides.
This straight-talking but slippery blonde bombshell has turned up, after-hours, in the middle of a storm, to audition for a stage adaptation of Venus in Furs, the erotic-romantic novella by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-masoch (18361895) whose name and work allowed us to apply the term “masochism” to pain-derived sexual pleasure. If this were an audition for Dormer, it couldn’t go better: a tour de force that will surely put everyone – Thrones fans or not – under her spell. What she couldn’t get me to do, though, is pile praise on David Ives’s increasingly punishing two-hander, which also stars David Oakes as the initially nonplussed, gradually beguiled, inevitably submissive adaptor Thomas, a chauvinist who gets his comeuppance as art meets life.
There are lashings of enjoyable comedy early on, as Vanda refuses to take the hint to get lost and takes charge of the reading – able to recite reams of the script despite affecting ignorance at the start. Blessed with star-quality, the Berkshireborn Dormer has a capacity to combine physical poise with facial expressiveness, glints of steeliness with flashes of warmth, in shifting, mercurial combinations. This explains why – aside from the “Weinstein” factor of predatory interest – Thomas lets her take over.
Marber treads a fine line on the titillation front, having Vanda slip between costumes with ambiguous suggestiveness, in full view of the audience. And that goes hand in glove with the theme of the piece: who’s calling the shots, men or women? Except that Ives’s script is so busy critiquing the empowerment and eroticism it plays with that it winds up tying itself in knots.
It’s impressive to see the actors contending with dives between American and English/mitteleuropean accents, role-swapping and even gender-switching. It’s less appealing trying to fathom what the play is driving at; and after all the clever-cleverness builds to a head, the climax feels crudely put, if not rather pat. A pretty creaky vehicle, then, but with a leading lady to die for cracking the whip. Worth a peek. Until Dec 9. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; venusonstage.com