In a simple room, adorned only by a large wardrobe, a dying woman, mother to eight children and wife to an unfaithful husband, lies on a bed. In a haze of morphine, crumpled sheets and regret, she looks back over her life. It is never easy becoming the past tense, and in the latest play from Irish writer Marina Carr the struggle between life and death - the thing in the wardrobe - is an epic one. Yet Carr's play, crammed with wild laughter and dense with unshed tears, is not so much about dying as about how to live.
Those who have lived every single second to the full, have loved and been loved with unrestrained passion and who have never let rancour and revenge curdle them, have absolutely no need to visit this play. The rest of us most certainly do. "It is easy to be happy," suggests the woman. "It is a decision. Like going to the dentist." Why then, do we so often choose unhappiness, when the only person we spite is ourselves?
Like all Carr's work, Woman and Scarecrow is laden with poetry and has flashes of romanticism, but here the tendency towards the lyrical is tempered with a robust humour that ensures the evening never becomes mawkish. It is made more palatable by two exquisitely judged central performances from Fiona Shaw as the woman and Brid Brennan as Scarecrow.
Perhaps the piece would benefit from a little editing. But this is a play that seeps into your very bones, making you realise that in squandering love we squander the best part of ourselves.
What the other papers thought ...
Fiona Shaw may have offered little to gripe about as Woman but Marina Carr's Beckett-like deathbed drama, complete with negligee-clad alter ego Scarecrow, prompted more sharply divergent assessments.
The Telegraph and Independent reviewers both wondered what they were doing watching a claustrophobic bedroom piece at the Royal Court Upstairs in midsummer, but respectively left "a fine, fiercely perverse choice of play" and "feeling energised rather than depressed".
Sam Marlowe at the Times, too, enthused, "Drama doesn't come much richer or stranger than this deathbed lament by the Irish playwright Marina Carr. An extraordinary brew, bittersweet and totally intoxicating."
So far, so good. Shaw lay dying very well, "never less than 100% convincing as a terminal case" for the Telegraph and "ageing and withering before our eyes" for the Sunday Times. Perhaps there was too much "lyrical Irishry", though, because reviewer Christopher Hart concludes: "'Static' would be one way to describe [the play]; 'stagnant' might be nearer the mark."
The Financial Times complained, "The alter-ego device is often the creakiest part of the play, and it gets worse as the end nears" with a death scene that "isn't just gruesome, it's gauche."
The Evening Standard took the greatest exception to Scarecrow/Death, not least because the actor arrives "dressed in what looks like a left-over costume from Sesame Street." Shaw's performance, reviewer Fiona Mountford decided, was "not enough to stop us wanting to turf Shaw out of bed and settle down for a good snooze ourselves."
· Until July 15. Box office: 020-7565 5000.
