★★★★☆
Richard Beecham’s new production of Tom Kempinski’s 1980 play is just about everything you could wish for in a two-hander. The script is eminently playable with dialogue that is both smart and sensitive, and the performances are extremely well-judged. The designer Simon Kenny’s single setting of a psychiatrist’s consulting room takes advantage of the venue’s in-the-round intimacy: it is simple, even stark, but elegant too. And significantly for a work that focuses on the soul-searching of a celebrated violinist struggling to cope with multiple sclerosis, there is live music to serve as a piercingly eloquent bridge between scenes.
The obvious springboard for Kempinski’s text was the life of the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, whose diagnosis with MS curtailed her brilliant career. (She died of the disease seven years after the play premiered.) Kempinski’s lead, Stephanie Abrahams, is a gifted, tautly wound artist whose unseen husband, a composer, has persuaded her to visit a psychiatrist. Tara Fitzgerald surrenders herself to the role without ever losing control of the complex emotions packed inside it. She gives a pitch-perfect portrayal of a bristlingly intelligent, creatively dedicated person of privilege whose body has begun to let her down.
The drama stems from this massively defensive woman’s resistance to the treatment she gets from Maureen Beattie’s Dr Feldmann, a role originally conceived for a male actor. The gender switch works beautifully. Set on a circular, white-carpeted and almost imperceptibly revolving platform, the play unfolds as a handful of office appointments that chart the characters’ stormy professional relationship. Fitzgerald’s Abrahams is by turns sharply sarcastic, prodigiously enraged, eventually broken and then, at least to some degree, humbled. Beattie, meanwhile, makes the most of what is probably the more difficult part. The doctor is an anchoring presence, clinically observant, often enigmatically silent and extraordinarily patient, especially when most of her occasional statements and even less probing questions tend to be thrown back into her face. Towards the end, however, she briefly but crucially snaps.
It’s not spoiling anything to reveal that the situation we are asked to witness here remains unresolved. What Kempinski is offering us are life lessons refracted through the difficult circumstances faced by a particular human being, and expressed in a relatively hopeful form. The writing in this chamber drama is high-calibre: clear, strong, unpretentious. This decidedly well-measured production does it justice.
Until March 18. orangetreetheatre.co.uk
