Snow and seduction
Force Majeure
T★★★✩✩
IM PRICE’S adaptation of Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s movie has all the makings of a searing exploration of First World, middle class problems.
Ebba and Thomas (Lyndsey Marshal and Rory Kinnear) are on a skiing holiday with their children, teenager Vera and her younger brother Harry (on this night Florence and Henry Hunt).
They have a week to detach themselves from phone and tablet screens and also the cycle of bickering that is their daily normal.
In director Michael Longhurst’s ambitious staging the action takes place on a (artificially) snowy slope with the majesty of the mountains serving as a backdrop (design Jon Bausor). This is possibly the first show with on-stage skiing. Young, chic people in brightly coloured piste garb enter from one side of the steeply racked stage and then slide diagonally across the stage.
Meanwhile Tomas and Ebba attempt relaxation as Ebba deeply resents her husband’s inability to peel himself away from his phone. Controlled avalanches are triggered by explosive charges. They stop uncontrolled bigger avalanches, mansplains Tomas. Then one awe-inspiring snowy surge heads straight for the family at an open air mountain restaurant. Everyone responds instinctively. Ebba dives over her children, customers scatter, and Tomas? Well, he picks up his phone and scarpers.
The already fraying relationship begins to unravel with this loss of trust. Kinnear delivers a terrific portrait of male inadequacy. For Ebba it is not only that Tomas’s instinct was to save himself and not his family that is so destructive,it is his cowardice in admitting that he ran away.
The fallout is embarrassingly
The Rubber Merchants ★★★★✩
Yplayed out in front of hotel guests, plus Tomas’s friend Mats (Suli
Rumi) and his young girlfriend
Jenny (Siena Kelly). But the play is more a comedy of manners OU MIGHT reasonably than the excavation of hidden think character that it promises to that there is be. The scene in which Mats and enough absurdity Jenny tussle, during a sleepless in the world night, over how they would have without inventing behaved in Ebba and Tomas’s situation it. But one of is a light and irrelevant comedy Israel’s leading interlude. absurdist playwrights Hanoch Levin,
The skiing is good, but Force who died in 1999 from cancer, was Majeure skates over the issues considered by many Israelis to be the instead of unearthing them. antidote to the real world version when his plays burst onto the country’s stages in the 1960s and 70s.
Here his grotesque comedy, given an east European makeover by Ukranian theatre company Gamayan, could be set anywhere, where people are paralysed by greed and fear of risk. A pharmacy is run by Bella (Hadas Kershaw) who helps diffident Yohanan (Tom Dayton) buy the condoms he needs. She does this by seducing him with the promise of sex at her home where, if things go to plan, she can extract a marriage proposal and a cheque for his small fortune.
All this is to the frustration of the more smooth operator Shmuel (Joseph Emms) who has his own stock of condoms to offload. Always present is a stage and disco lights where these three unlikable characters perform Dimitry Saratsky’s crude songs of introspection like self obsessed karaoke singers before stepping back into the action. The men end up vying for the woman who is always one step ahead.
Asya Sosis’s production flaunts Levin’s sexual imagery and neatly pivots around his play’s unconventional form. There is a bit of Pirandello here — where Emm’s Shmuel derides the audience for witnessing all his disappointment and discomfort without ever letting it touch them — and a bit of Godotlike Beckett there.
Like many a fine play you leave with an uncomfortable sense of mortality, which may or may not be a recommendation.