The nature of memory has long magnetised dramatists. It is just tough that the experience of watching Peter Quilter’s play is shadowed by recollections of Pinter’s A Kind of Alaska. The parallels are not exact but, since Quilter’s play deals with a man emerging from a coma with no memory of the last 11 years, it is hard not to think of Pinter’s play, or Oliver Sacks’s book Awakenings, which inspired it.
4000 Days becomes a battle for possession of the hospitalised Michael, who has suffered a blood clot in the brain. On one side is his acerbically possessive mother, Carol, who claims ownership of her son; on the other is Michael’s loving partner, Paul, shocked to find himself unrecognised. Various attempts are made to reawaken Michael’s lost memories: one is through his passion for painting, which the pragmatic Paul has apparently stifled, another is through back-numbers of newspapers, helpfully embodied by the Guardian. I was just surprised that more use was not made of music and even more astonished that we never see a doctor who could have provided the clinical information required.
In the end, the play asks whether the power of a lover is stronger than that of a mother, but this primal Lawrentian struggle is expressed in decorously polite terms. Even if the play errs on the side of caution, Matt Aston’s production is deftly played.
Alistair McGowan as Michael expresses the bewilderment of a man who has mislaid a part of his life, while Daniel Weyman conveys Paul’s mix of affection and guilt and, best of all, Maggie Ollerenshaw suggests the woe beneath the mother’s waspishness. But in the end I found myself mildly intrigued rather than, as in Hitchcock’s study of amnesia, spellbound.
- At the Park theatre, London, until 13 February. Box office: 020-7870 6876.
