David Hare’s Skylight, which has plonked its council flat set in the middle of Broadway after a successful West End run, offers stage realism of a very high order – emotional, sensorial, culinary. You sense the cold air blowing in through the door, smell the tomato sauce cooking on the stove. Surely I can’t have been alone in wanting to rush the stage and take the spaghetti off the flame before it turned gluey?
Skylight, which first premiered 20 years ago, is about both the state of the heart and the state of the nation. Kyra (Carey Mulligan) used to work for, and sleep with, Tom (Bill Nighy), a successful restaurateur. But when his wife discovered the affair, Kyra left and they haven’t seen each other since. Tom, now a widower and adrift, turns up at her flat in hopes of succor, salvation, turning back time’s pitiless clock hands.
At first he gets a very chilly reception – and not only because of Kyra’s futile electric fire.
“I’m just asking if you’d like to go out,” says Tom, in Nighy’s gentlemanly mumble.
“What for?” says Kyra. “Tom, don’t you think I’ve got enough memories? Why should I want any more?”
Yet Kyra does and the play’s suspense derives from seeing whether these former lovers can find their way back into each other’s souls, hearts – and pants. (The drama is bookended by two less essential scenes in which Tom’s son, Matthew Beard, also drops in – the first a means of exposition, the second a welcome, if not quite credible, bit of consolation.)
It isn’t only that there’s been a betrayal of trust, but that Kyra and Tom’s separation has only intensified and emphasized the differences in their worldviews. Kyra, now a schoolteacher, thinks that the less fortunate deserve aid and attention. Tom doesn’t care. How does their Tory-Lib Dem coalition fare? Well, think of some other coalitions you may know.
I loved this play madly when I read it in college, not too long after it debuted. I thought it romantic and tragic and true. In this revival, directed with sensitivity and some unnecessarily cinematic flair by Stephen Daldry, I can now see the working of Hare’s hand more than I’d like, particularly in some of the more impassioned, politically minded monologues.
When Nighy played the role in 1997, there were only 14 years between him and that Kyra, Stella Gonet. There are 36 between him and Mulligan, which ought to seem creepy, but it doesn’t. Nighy wears his age lightly and Mulligan has always had the air of an old soul in a young body. That he’s a specialist at masking emotion while she can’t help but show every shade of feeling lends the pairing interest and pathos. His mannerisms play against her vulnerability.
There’s a certain sputtering in the first act (some, though not all, is in the script), but the second still has its melancholy pull. This Skylight still manages to suggest how right these two are for each other and how wrong, how much we want them to be together again even as we know they can’t.
