Five years after its closure and demolition, Riverside Studios – now sited under a stack of luxury apartments – is coming back to life by stages.
First it gained a new river frontage. A commercial TV studio is up and running, as are two Thames-side restaurants, a coffee bar and foyer gallery. Two sleek cinemas are nearly finished, and this week the smaller of its two theatres has opened, with a pretentious, pointless adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film.
A psychodrama in which the personalities of a nurse, Alma (Alice Krige), and her mute actress patient Elizabet (Nobuhle Mngcwengi) blur and meld, Persona hinges on guilt – over infidelity, abortion, hating rather than loving one’s child. It gains precisely nothing from translation to the stage.
Director Paul Schoolman inserts himself and his grey bobble of a topknot into the staging as a narrator who intones Bergman’s stage directions and script notes. The acting is flat and affectless. The action, such as it is, is overshadowed by the eerie music generated by William Close on the instrument he invented, the Earth Harp, the strings of which stretch across the auditorium.
The music is a welcome diversion from the more tedious passages, as is the beautiful monochrome film by Filip Haglund of the coast near Bergman’s Swedish island home, projected on the back wall. The final image, where a picture of Elizabet’s son is joined by photos of other threatened or dead children, including drowned Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi, is shamefully irrelevant. It’s good to have Riverside back: I wish they’d found a better opening production to put in it.
Until Feb 23 (020 8237 1000, riversidestudios.co.uk)
