There's an problem to be solved with this script. Arranged in three parts, it tells interlocking stories of marital infidelity and betrayal
in the lives of nine people.
The script's technical goodies are two: the nine people are played by four actors, and several of the scenes are two scenes in one, with dialogue intermingled or even coincident. That's right: two actors speak the same words to different people in different scenes at the same time on stage.
And therein lies the problem, or at least it seemed to be one in this production.
The coincident dialogue scenes introduce us to Jane, Leon, Pete, and Sonja. Jane and Pete are married to one another, as are Leon and Sonja. Leon and Jane have a one-night stand at the same time that Pete and Sonja pick each other up and nearly go through with the same deed. The dialogue gadget never becomes more than that; we don't hear line readings distinct enough to make us hear two different people.
So we're left at intermission feeling like we're at a second-rate Alan Ayckbourn sex farce.
But Leon and Jane have two juicy monologues that begin to unwrap the stories of Neil and Sarah, and of Valerie, Nick, and John, and we meet those people in the second act (parts 2 and 3). (This is one case where it might not pay to read your program beforehand.)
In this act, almost all dialogue interlocks with another simultaneous scene: Neil reads a letter he is writing to Sarah while Sarah talks to her unseen therapist; Valerie and Nick tell their versions of an act of roadside assistance that ends tragically.
The problem, then, is that we have to get over the contrivances of the first act to get to the emotional payoff at the end of the second. John, returning late from an evening with (we learn at last, Sarah), hears his wife Valerie's voice on the answering machine as he comes in the door.
He doesn't pick up, and it turns out to be her last message before she disappears.
There are some interesting design choices that point up the differences between the two acts. In the first, everything is circular: the six scenes are shifted with the assistance of two concentric revolves; actors are caught in perfectly round pools of light or dance under rotating gobos; a bar's banquette is a quarter-round. In the second act, the scenes are static, and the design pallette is squares and diamonds: actors are stationed at compass-point positions on boxy chairs, and are framed in quadrangular set pieces.
Andrew Long, as Pete, Neil, and John, does the best job of bringing distinct characters to life.
The text explores some intriguing thematic territory, thoughts about whether it is possible, indeed polite, to comprehend someone else. A character relates a dream in which she sees another person, and says, "I felt I was intruding into something private." Jane and Pete bicker about whether she "knows" Paula, whom she's had in for coffee once or twice.
And Jane interrupts her monologue about Nick to tell us what we've
discovered ourselves, that the story is not about Nick, but about her trust in Pete.
If this narrative sounds familiar, it's because it was worked by Bovell into the screenplay for Lantana.
Here is a case where the screenplay is more successful than the stage play, as it focuses more on the mystery of what happened to Valerie, and Leon is a more fully-developed character. It engages our empathy and does not rely so much on parlor tricks.
