THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
By Jez Butterworth
Crooms Hill, London, SE10 8ES, until October 27, 2024
A sumptuous warmth emanates from Emily Bestow's meticulously well designed set. We are presented with the interior of a cabin, wooden floors, walls and ceiling, a split level with a kitchen and an old fashioned refrigerator, a door leading off to a bedroom. To the right, a cool blue light dapples and dances over the night outside the cabin, implying a body of water in the near distance and maybe even the mystery of darkness and the danger of the unknown. A visual feast of three dimensional intrigue.
And full disclosure, I come to this with no exposure to Jez Butterworth, the English playwright who wrote the famous and award winning 2009 play Jerusalem, depicting life for a motley crew of characters in rural Wiltshire.
The River is altogether more intimate, presenting us with the nameless owner of the cabin, played by the revered Paul McGann (the eighth actor to take on the mantle of that Great British institution as the eponymous character in Doctor Who back in 1989, for one ill fated made-for-TV film). Here McGann is a subtle study in physical and psychological understatement, an affable if reserved and sweet romantic who seems to have brought his girlfriend, played by Amanda Ryan of Shameless fame to his family's riverside cabin.
The dialogue is thick with poetry, metaphor and romantic chemistry and just when things seem to be building to a point of tension, another woman is introduced to complicate the intrigue of this domestic interplay. It isn't a simple love triangle though; rather this third individual, played with assured and nuanced complexity by Kerri McLean (most recently seen in Netflix's Bodkin), seems to walk back on in place of the first woman, causing the audience to question the sequence of events and the sense of time.
So far so cryptic.
Alas, so much for the payoff with all this buildup.
I am not going to spoil anything because I do not think there is much to spoil. Butterworth goes to the bother of building all this mystery, layering all these elements of tension, challenging our eyes and our minds with a flurry of questions about the potentially nonlinear nature of what is taking place in front of us and the payoff, when it comes, does not feel like it is equal to the investment he has demanded of us throughout this 80 minute narrative.
I do not blame director James Haddrell. He's done a clearly proficient job of taking three talented performers and a slew of other talented designers and rallied their efforts to make the best of a story that feels like it wants to be deeply symbolic of a Freudian theory of the oedipal leanings of all humanity. I do wonder about the choice of material. Is it meant to make us feel more oomph?
Two weeks prior, when reviewing the current West End production of Waiting for Godot – and I forget, being such a Beckett fan, that theatergoers still react this way at all – the woman next to me turned to me at intermission and said, 'Can you tell me if you know what's going on?' Maybe 20 or 30 years from now when the play has had some time to age we will all feel differently but sitting in Greenwich when the house lights turned up, I could sympathize with that Beckettian sense of confusion.
A play that I had expected, based on Butterworth's reputation to make me feel 'phwoar!' had left me feeling, 'huh...?'
