Americans in Paris have inspired countless novelists, from Henry James to Ernest Hemingway. They also gave Gershwin the idea for a great musical and feature in popular movies such as Charade. Yet I’ve rarely seen a more rootless pair of expatriates than the young couple at the centre of Amy Herzog’s play first seen at Yale Rep in 2011. Although they are strongly played by James Norton and Imogen Poots, I felt a play about cultural isolation gradually dwindled into implausible melodrama.
At first you feel Zack and Abby have a lot going for them. Young, good-looking and recently married, they have decided to uproot to Paris. He is a doctor doing research to prevent children contracting Aids; she, once a promising actor, now teaches yoga. Everything looks dandy, except you wonder why Zack is suddenly found at home in mid-afternoon watching porn on his computer. It also seems odd that Abby, having pestered Zack to come to Paris, has abandoned all attempts to learn French and is obsessed with getting news from home about her pregnant sister.
I have to be careful not to give too much away but it’s fair to say that Herzog writes well about a fraught marriage. Zack and Abby ransack simple exchanges looking for hidden insults and a row erupts over whether Abby should wear a see-through top or a hoodie to go out on a double date with their Senegalese landlord and his wife. Herzog’s larger point is that Americans often transplant their neediness and neurosis to other lands, as if in search of a panacea. But while that’s an interesting idea, Herzog seeks to jack up the tension further by suggesting there is violence in the air. I also began to lose faith in the credibility of the action when a bathroom door that had been brutally forced open appeared miraculously undamaged in the following scene.
Fortunately the acting, in Michael Longhurst’s production, is very good. Poots made an impressive West End debut earlier this year in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and once again she plays a wife slowly waking up to the truth about her husband. Physically, Poots reminds me of a young Goldie Hawn; emotionally, she has the capacity to show the accident-prone self-absorption of a certain kind of American while at same time enlisting your sympathy for her isolation. Norton, who seems to be the epitome of good-looking normality, also gradually reveals Zack’s insecurity as if peeling the layers off an onion. They make a dynamic couple and there is staunch support from Malachi Kirby as their furtively pot-smoking landlord and Faith Alabi as his watchfully censorious wife.
“We’re strangers in a strange land,” says Abby pointing up the predicament of these young marrieds. I wish we had heard more in this 95-minute play about the age-old conflict, which was one of James’s favourite themes, between American innocence and European experience. Instead Herzog takes us into knife-wielding territory that suggests this particular couple would have been as unhappy in Poughkeepsie as in Paris.
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At the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 3 February. Box office: 020-3282 3808.
