Overall, I enjoyed this play but it certainly had its
shortcomings. On the plus side, the acting by Lesley Manville was superb. She
could easily have tipped into over-acting the way she went for it, but it
always stayed the right side of that line as simply energetic, precise and
withering. She plays the richest woman in the world, Claire Zachanassian, who
at a ripe old age has returned to her home town of Slurry. It is a town down on
its luck and hoping she’ll bail them out. Indeed she will – but at a price.
She offers a billion dollars as long as the man who wronged her in her teens,
Alfred Ill played by Hugo Weaving has his life ended. He regards the past as
past but she fiercely nurses the grievance of having been made pregnant and
then portrayed as an easy lay by Alfred and his witnesses all those years ago.
Indeed, two of those who lied to attest they and others had fucked Claire (the
play’s language) are on stage as a pair of castrated and blinded oddities.
So we are left to see how the town reacts to this bargain.
On the face of it, there is outright rejection but in fact the billion proves
too tempting. The problem is that this is all dragged out over three and a half
hours (albeit with two intervals) and I think the real criticism is that the town’s selling itself
to the filthy lucre could have been so much more interestingly handled. There
was no real sense of tension or of a psychological journey. This seems down to
Tony Kushner’s re-writing of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s original play.
This was a lavish NT production with full use made of the
Olivier’s facilities particularly the revolving stage as well as its budget for
actors. We had a full stage including children who put on the After School
Tumblers show for Claire. Despite this, the theatre was by no means full,
perhaps because of the mixed reviews that complained of its length. For me,
the performance by Lesley Manville made it worthwhile but I’d hate to catch it
on a day when she was replaced by her understudy.
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