Watching this prize-winning play by the Dutch dramatist Lot Vekemans, I was strongly reminded of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Its emotional intensity derives from seeing two people reliving a past by which they are traumatised: superbly acted, it makes for 80 minutes of uncomfortable but compelling viewing.
I wish that Vekemans, whose play has been translated by Rina Vergano, gave her characters names, rather than dubbing them He and She, since they are individuals and not types. As they meet in a deserted chapel cemetery, the key facts about them soon become clear. They were married until he walked out on the millennial New Year’s Eve, have not seen each other in a decade and, while he has moved to Normandy, she has stayed in their native Holland. What brings them together, ostensibly, is a scheme by the cemetery to relocate 200 graves including that of their son, Jakob, who died tragically young.
This is obviously a play about how we react to bereavement and is based on acute psychological observation. Vekemans suggests that the loss of a child, far from uniting couples, may actually drive a wedge between them. She also implies that there are multiple ways of coping with grief. The man, who is a journalist, seeks some form of closure by writing a book about the subject and starting a new life; his ex-wife immerses herself in daily routines without ever being able to expunge her memories. But, on a wider level, this is also a play about marriage and the way separation or divorce can never erase remembered intimacies.
It is a fiercely claustrophobic play to which Paul Miller, as director, gives a strong physical life by showing the couple prowling warily round this bleak anteroom to extinction. He also ensures there is emotional counterpoint in the performances. Zubin Varla as the man exudes a restless febrile anxiety, even though he is the one who has supposedly learned to deal with death. Claire Price, on the other hand, is initially more relaxed while gradually revealing that grief can become an addiction and marital hurts never forgotten. But each actor memorably shifts and changes in a chamber piece that, as in Ibsen, shows how the present is perennially haunted by the inescapable past.
• At the Orange Tree, Richmond, until 2 December. Box office: 020-8940 3633.
