Three years ago, we saw that even an actress as gifted as Ruth Wilson couldn’t breathe life into Ivo van Hove’s revival of Jean Cocteau’s fractured and painfully dated monologue The Human Voice (La Voix Humaine). There’s even less to savour in Jermyn Street’s Gallic import, a revival of Jean Genet’s overwrought 1947 psychodrama about two sisters, the employees of a flighty, self-absorbed bourgeoise, who act out a series of bleak role-playing games when she is absent.
True, the ultra-intimate confines of this London studio theatre — one of my long-time favourites — help to crank up the sense of claustrophobia as the two women prod and pick at each other. But by the end of Annie Kershaw’s brisk production, which uses Martin Crimp’s translation, you’re once again left wondering why Genet’s blustery, one-dimensional onslaughts on middle-class propriety continue to get an airing.
“Spit”, “vomit” and “scum” are some of the leitmotifs in this version, which opens with a tempestuous snippet of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Kershaw, a product of Jermyn Street’s Carne Deputy Director Scheme, gets astringent performances out of Charlie Oscar and Anna Popplewell as Claire and Solange, sisters who while away the time in their mistress’s boudoir, airily discussing a plan to poison her while they re-enact power relationships. You can, if you wish, interpret these ritualistic battles as symbols of how the ruling classes forever crush the noble spirit of the proletariat.
We get a soupçon of noirish intrigue when we suddenly learn that the mistress’s dubious lover -– whom the maids have shopped to the police — has been released from custody. But there’s no real attempt at tension or urgency: this is an absurdist piece that wafts along with the casual inconsistency of a bad dream. Oscar is brooding and sultry as she tries on a glamorous dress; Popplewell gives us a stiff-necked Solange, strapped into her menial’s uniform. Cat Fuller’s set design combines antique touches — there’s an ornate, old school telephone — with a sleek, white-tiled interior dominated by a window that sometimes doubles as a mirror.
Carla Harrison-Hodge makes the best of the haughty, Sloane-ish caricature that is the character known only as Mistress. Joe Dines’s sound design adds a hint of thumping heartbeats, but all the embellishments can’t salvage a piece that has no heart and no pulse. A pity, because we rarely see plays from across the Channel. Skip this one and look out for Jean-Phillipe Daguerre’s much more conventional offering, Farewell Mister Haffmann, set during the Occupation, which comes to the Park in north London in March.
★★☆☆☆
90min
To January 22, jermynstreettheatre.co.uk; Reading Rep, January 28 to February 8, readingrep.com
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