The past that is always present
T★★★✩✩
HE TWO people at the core of Cordelia Lynn’s high concept play, which reopens a revamped Donmar Warehouse, carry within them the legacy of a pogrom that took place almost a century before they were born.
Both their forebears were there. But with his antecedents being Polish and hers Jewish it emerges that this shared heritage is no cosy coincidence what with his people having murdered hers.
Lynn is interested in how trauma can be passed down the generations, from perpetrators as well as victims, like a compulsory heirloom. To that past she also imagines a scary, antisemitic future.
Performed mostly on a prop-less stage with an ashen landscape around its margins (designed by Basia Binkowska) the play and the relationship begins at a party. Tom Mothersdale’s Him is a left wing firebrand who seduces Her — Abigail Weinstock in her professional debut — with a mixture of virtue signalling and awkward charm.
It is a relationship defined by his passionate idealism and her cool rationalism, a trait reflected by her work as a research scientist. Despite these differences the couple endure even as they come under pressure, not only from the revelation of that shared history, the bloody implications of which she immediately grasps, but also their country’s increasingly right wing politics which seep into their home-life. He brings it in from the streets. She can even smell the violent protests he leads.
It is here their hitherto dormant psychologies awaken. When he first refers to her as “a Jew” he is being protective. The rise of racism is making her a target, he warns. Yet his use of the term carries a threat. And as the play lurches along its condensed timeline moments of poetic introspection reveal the rising panic of a woman who forgot to keep a bag packed.
A disclosure here: I read the play before I saw it. What stands out from the page are the stark emotional and physical confines of the relationship. The majority of
the scenes take place in the home, a space that becomes less safe as the play progresses. Yet Elayce Ismail’s production almost fatally dilutes the sense of dread by an uncertain tone that veers unhelpfully towards rom-com at times before the writing wrenches the evening back on course.
There is room for a lighter touch. It would be spoiler to say exactly how, but an unexpected coda is brimful of warmth. Yet even here the climax has reduced impact as clutter obscures the big visual reveal. I left admiring the play I read more than the one I saw.
When he first refers to her as ‘a Jew’ he is being protective