Theatre
Echoes
Peter Jenkins
Reunion and Dark Pony (King's Head) Faith Healer (Royal Court) In the nearly three years I have been reviewing plays for the Spectator the writer whose work has most pleased and excited me is that of the American playwright David Mamet. His double bill in the backroom of the King's Head in Islington occupies barely an hour but in that time I i can promise you the best play on offer n London almost perfectly performed by American actors. Reunion is the chief piece of the two. It is a description of a meeting between father and daughter after a 20-year separation. Bernie is 53, Carole 24; they are blood strangers. In order to find common ground they have to map out the geography of their lives; he does so with the nervous guilt of a reformed alcoholic in a stream of anecdote and reminiscence, she in far fewer words but ones which give us poignant glimpses of her life and the desolation which it probably holds in store for her. Such is Mamet's skill that in 50 minutes or less one is brought to know both of these people, to care about them and to know something of their whole world.
At first sight of them standing there, stiff as strangers, in Bernie's could-be-anyone's apartment, I was reminded of a Hopper Painting. This was not just because I had been on the previous day to the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, because I discover I made exactly the same note when I.saw the play in New York in 1979. Mamet, like Hopper, is a realist or a naturalist who conveys a powerful and haunting sense of the inner loneliness of modern urban life. His plays depend, however, almost entirely upon language which he uses with meticulous accuracy and the greatest economy, being blessed with a perfect ear for American speech. !garnet's dialogue is masterly. On the Page it looks like prose-poetry but in the theatre it sounds entirely natural. He knows exactly how to make a character say one thing so as to mean entirely another. For example, when Carol says of her husband You know he's a hell of a man' we know at once that he isn't. He performs the most difficult feat of all when he has Bernie tell a long-winded boring story, an account of a drunken exploit when working as a telephone company linesman on Cape Cod, in such a way that the audience isn't for a fmoment bored. He can be profound and tinny without having to nudge his audience or resorting to obtrusive one-liners. One marvellous line is when Bernie, referring to a night spent in jail, observes, 'you've got to be where you are while you're there, 01 you're nowhere.' Mamet's dialogue goes deep into his characters and their worlds without ever losing its air of natural banality.
It is important that Reunion and Dark Pony are American acted as the nuance of the speech is so vital to his art. The performances at the King's Head by the real-life father and daughter, Don and Susannah Fellows, were better I thought than in the New York production which Mamet himself directed. Bernie is by far the largest of the parts but the girl's is just as important to the play and Susannah Fellows deserves as much credit as her father for the way she conveys so much about herself and her world with so few lines to speak. The play consists of 13 brief scenes and the only complaint I have with it is the clumsy device of dimming the lights and adjusting the position of the players on the stage to convey the passing of time. The director of this excellent production is Stuart Owen. Dark Pony is the briefest of pieces in which a father tells a Red Indian story to his little girl on a late-night car journey. In New York this was done as a curtain-raiser which I think works better than playing it as an epilogue, somethitig of an anticlimax to Reunion, as is done at the King's Head.
Faith Healer, by the Irish writer Brian Friel, consists of four monologues. It is a weird play this, a tale of Irish mystery and imagination, which held my attention and in the end gripped me tight in spite of my misgivings about both content and technique. The story concerns an itinerant faith healer married to a judge's daughter, both of them Irish who spends his working life travelling in a van with his wife and cockney theatrical agent ,practising his dubious art in Welsh and-Scottish villages. First we hear Frank's remembered version of their lives together, then Grace's and finally Teddy's. Their accounts of the same incidents — the death of Frank's father, a genuine (or was it?) miracle performed one night in Wales, the still-born birth of Grace's child in the Scottish Highlands, a moment of happiness in an Irish bar — are in dramatic variance. Finally, Frank returns to the stage to tie together the mysterious ends which have been dangled before us and to reveal what happened on that night of his death.
The play is well acted by Patrick Magee, Helen Mirren, and Stephen Lewis. The tone of it changes completely when Stephen Lewis appears as the seedy theatrical agent who had previously managed a bagpipeplaying whippet. His stand-up comic turn was something of a tour de force but I thought the acting honours belonged to Helen Mirren who was the one who most convinced me about these strange happenings. The writing is laid on thick in the Irish manner and this is the sort of play which is much mote powerful in the theatre than in retrospect. My disbelief rapidly unsuspended itself as I emerged from the Celtic mists into the cold English air of Sloane Square.
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