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| Show | Did He Like It? |
Synopsis | |
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This gripping thriller focuses on the meeting between a grief-stricken mother and a young boy who is in some way connected to the death of her son. |
In Modern London, Some Long Shadows of Despair
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: June 16, 2008
A man. A woman. An empty room that soon will be filled with spilled secrets. And, oh yes, a convenient bottle of liquor to make the spilling easier.
Architecture for plays doesn’t get much more basic — or hackneyed — than this. But Philip Ridley’s “Vincent River,” which opened Sunday night as part of the Brits Off Broadway festival at the 59E59 Theaters, makes it clear that a fully functioning, top-of-the-line haunted house can be erected from the dustiest blueprint, especially with two nigh-perfect performers like Deborah Findlay and Mark Field on hand to bring it into existence.
Directed with invisible skill by Steve Marmion, this harsh, lyrical and joltingly funny drama about a bereaved mother and the anguished young man who crashes into her life joins the ranks of other recent works that have milked rough magic from the tense two-character play, including David Harrower’s “Blackbird” and Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City.” Like them, “Vincent River” plays cat-and-mouse with its audience, dispensing truths, half-truths and falsehoods in strategically staggered increments.
The play begins, as such plays do, with a volley of questions. Most of them are fired by Anita (Ms. Findlay), a ripe, middle-aged woman of defensive brusqueness, at Davey (Mr. Field), a hunched, feral 17-year-old, covered in cuts, who has been following her for months and has tracked her to her new, still unfurnished flat in London’s squalid East End. (The appropriately desolate set is by Harry Scott.)
How was Davey wounded? Anita asks. Why has he been stalking her? Does he know something about the death of her son, Vincent, who was murdered in a men’s room in an abandoned train station, probably the victim of a gay hate crime? And isn’t Davey curious about her, about why she’s living like this?
Mr. Ridley doesn’t seem all that interested in the baiting game per se. Certainly I’ve seen it executed more slyly and subtly elsewhere. You can figure out where it plans to take you long before it gets there. What gives “Vincent River” its particular and considerable power is how it uses a classic, creaky structure to cast big, disturbing shadows that wind up following you home.
That “Vincent River” is as conventional as it is may surprise fans of Mr. Ridley’s earlier, grotesquely whimsical work, which includes “The Pitchfork Disney” (1990) and “The Fastest Clock in the Universe” (1992), as well as the screenplays for “The Krays” (1990) and “The Reflecting Skin” (1990), which he also directed. (He is also the author of children’s books.)
He usually writes apocalyptic fairy tales, creepy stories of cruel lives in a blasted world that suggest J. G. Ballard reworking the Brothers Grimm. His “Mercury Fur,” a portrait of a dystopian England in which a child is butchered for fun and profit, aroused angrily divided responses when it was staged in London in 2005.
By contrast “Vincent River,” written in 2000 and revived in London (with Mr. Field) last year, is almost doggedly naturalistic. It takes place in real time, in the present tense, in a recognizable London. It employs some rather hoary devices, like having the characters lead each other through memories of their pasts as if they were detectives, or maybe hypnotists.
But from the first scalding image of two figures in silhouette, Anita and Davey have an undeniable and complex reality. It soon becomes clear that their imaginations have room for Mr. Ridley’s Gothic sense of doom. How could they not, given the grisly way in which Vincent, whose body was discovered by Davey, was murdered?
“I don’t wanna keep seeing him,” Davey says. He wants the vision to get up and “walk out of my head.” Anita, on the other hand, wants Davey to relive that vision as precisely as possible. Their tug of war becomes a sort of mutual exorcism, during which a whole series of relationships is artfully summoned into being.
The developing intimacy between Davey and Anita — enhanced by pills and pot, as well as gin and tonics, gulped from tea cups — becomes a magnifying lens for portraits of other bonds, in particular between Anita and Vincent, and Davey and his mother, leading to a surreal blurring of familial boundaries.
More and more characters start to fill the room, vivid and undismissable, as the woman and boy exchange stories. Mr. Ridley has given Anita and Davey set-piece monologues that are saved from expository self-consciousness by the fineness and poetic exactness of the imagery.
Davey’s account of riding a roller coaster with his parents sums up that family’s dynamic with startling efficiency. Anita’s description of trying to dispose of a cache of magazines becomes a funny nightmare vision of trying to run away from the inescapable. Her story about a liaison with a married man, and the persecution she endures at work because of it, sets off echoes about ritualistic social cruelty that grow louder as the play proceeds.
Ms. Findlay (seen here in the original production of Caryl Churchill’s “Top Girls” and Pam Gems’s “Stanley”) and Mr. Field perform their characters’ faltering dance of aggression and retreat with hypnotic fierceness and delicacy, containing and subverting an emotional violence that, every so often, erupts with unnerving impact.
They let us see Anita and Davey surprising themselves by what they feel and reveal. And even if we anticipate what they’re going to say, we share that surprise. We also share the sense of burning contamination they feel at the end. The chances of the image of the dead Vincent River ever getting up and walking out of Davey’s head are very slim. That’s just as true for us as it is for him.
VINCENT RIVER
By Philip Ridley; directed by Steve Marmion; designed by Harry Scott; lighting by Aaron Spivey; sound by Mr. Marmion; assistant director, Tobias Wright; stage manager, Raynelle Wright. Presented by TFP, Andrew Fishwick, Kate Mackonochie and Ros Povey, producers, in association with Old Vic New Voices. At the 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street, Manhattan; (212) 279-4200. Through June 29. Running time: 1 hours 25 minutes.
WITH: Deborah Findlay (Anita) and Mark Field (Davey).
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