Comparisons, says Dogberry, are odorous. But it's impossible not to set David Grindley's West End production of Joanna Murray-Smith's play against the version Roger Michell directed at the Cottesloe three years ago. In nearly every respect, things looked better on the South Bank.
There is still much virtue in the play, here transposed from Melbourne to London, investigating the politics of marriage. The basic situation is familiar enough: George, a star critic, suddenly abandons his 32-year marriage to Honor to shack up with Claudia, a cool, 28-year-old predator. George is driven by passion and vanity. For Claudia he is a kind of intellectual trophy. But, with some skill, Murray-Smith implies the real victor is Honor, who finds her creative instinct unblocked and is forced into a re-definition of self.
Minor rewriting has taken place since the Cottesloe. But the play still hits the occasional raw nerve. Honor, before her desertion, shrewdly declares: "Passion is partly knowing who each other used to be." The gulf between George and his new lover opens up when he fantasises about escape, while she insists he has to keep making his mark: clearly George is only as good as his last column.
But re-casting has changed the balance of the play. At the National, Eileen Atkins invested Honor with her unique brand of mordant watchfulness. Diana Rigg has similar moving moments of deep stillness. But Rigg also possesses a feisty irony that suddenly makes you aware how often Murray-Smith allows Honor the last damning word in each scene. When Claudia announces "I take care of myself" and Honor retorts "Time takes care of all of us", she sounds like the wisecracking Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
Even more crucially, Martin Jarvis as George seems to be acting the role of a literary intellectual, where Corin Redgrave previously embodied it. Jarvis does nothing wrong: he creases his brow to betoken thought, raises his voice to indicate anger, and marks book pages to show he's a real critic. But what I missed, until the final moments, was the blank desolation of a man who comes to realise that he could not love his dear so much loved he not Honor more.
Natascha McElhone as the heartlessly seductive Claudia, and Georgina Rich as George and Honor's under-achieving daughter, have an easier task and acquit themselves well. But I miss the hermetic confinement of the Cottesloe. Above all, Honor's residual strength, instead of stealing on us unawares, is signalled in advance by the lustrous presence of Dame Diana.
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