Age overtaken by youth, the mentor outwitted by the protegé: it is the situation of countless plays and films from The Master Builder to All About Eve. And while Donald Margulies plays elegant variations on the theme in Collected Stories, it is one of those civilised, bookish two-handers that belongs naturally off-Broadway but that, in spite of excellent performances, looks a trifle thin-blooded on a West End stage.
Margulies confronts us with a shifting power-relationship between two women over a six-year span. Ruth Steiner is a respected short-story writer and teacher who testily passes on the fruits of her experience; Lisa Morrison is a 26-year-old graduate student whose gushing exterior conceals what Henry James called "the hungry futurity of youth".
Over six scenes we see Lisa transformed with Ruth's help, from wide-eyed admirer into published writer earning rave reviews in the New York Times. The crunch comes when Lisa uses Ruth's intimate relationship with Delmore Schwartz as the basis for her own first novel.
Some things Margulies does well: he shows us Ruth at work engaging in detailed practical criticism of one of Lisa's early stories. The inexorable pathos of the master overtaken by the disciple is also faithfully caught. But the debate about the legitimacy of literary appropri ation, while even-handedly written, comes rather late .
It is an intimate, modestly intelligent play that looks over-enlarged on the Haymarket stage where Ruth's supposedly ascetic Greenwich Village apartment has, in John Gunter's design, a plutocratic spaciousness. But Howard Davies's atmospheric production is graced by two exceptional performances. Helen Mirren superbly captures Ruth's initial wariness which gradually gives way to mother-hen protectiveness and eventually a furious anger. Anne-Marie Duff punches her weight as the ambitious Lisa, capturing the character's growth from doting pupil to slayer of her surrogate-mother with an assurance that augurs well for her future.
Mirren and Duff act and inter-act beautifully, even if the play itself has a slow-burning quietude that belongs in a smaller, off-West End house.
This review appeared in some earlier editions of yesterday's paper
