We glimpse them first sitting side by side on a bench with their backs to us, looking through a window at the street. The scene has a touch of an Edward Hopper painting about it, and their backs speak of tension, desire and pain. They are Michel and Anne-Marie, returning almost four years after their marriage ended to the French town where they used to live and the hotel where they were once happy – like murderers going back to the scene of the crime.
In this rare revival of Marguerite Duras’s two-hander – a play with shades of Noël Coward’s Private Lives and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos – director Jeff James shows us the ex-lovers from different perspectives. We see them from afar and from behind, in filmic closeup and then in an arena, in which we stand as if watching a sporting match.
It’s a neat idea and is executed with a cool precision. But Duras’s writing is so elliptical, so self-consciously lyrical and doomy, that we get little sense of character and an excess of emotion, in a translation that shows its age. Misery scents the air, but it is hard to empathise with people who know themselves as little as they know each other.
The realisation that love alone might not be enough to sustain a relationship is terrible. Yet this pair are so self-obsessed that it’s hard to be sympathetic with them given their apparent surprise that marriage is not made from passionate nights in hotel rooms, but from the compromises of daily life.
Sam Troughton and Emily Barclay are admirably restrained and always watchable. This navel-gazing production, however, is so inert that it is more likely to invoke mild boredom than strong passion.
• At the Young Vic, London, until 17 October. Box office: 020-7922 2922.
