Hampstead Theatre, London – until 28 August 2021
Reviewed by Alun Hood
4****
It’s not absolutely essential to carry out some background reading about tortured genius Tennessee Williams before exposing yourself to this late-career play, revived at the very theatre where it had it’s world premiere in 1967… but it would probably help. At times grim, at others downright rollicking, The Two Character Play was regarded with great affection by the author himself, who claimed it was his most beautiful work after A Streetcar Named Desire but also noted that he was hurtling towards mental breakdown during the decade it took him to write it.
Set in an unspecified theatre as a brother-and-sister acting team struggle to mount a performance of an unnamed script (a doomy Southern Gothic affair that’s almost a parody of Williams’s own work at it’s most overwrought) on an unfinished set, with no props or costumes, deserted by the rest of the cast, technical crew and, increasingly, their own sanity, the atmosphere is of creeping unease, suddenly shot through with flashes of blind panic. It’s not an easy play to grasp; the tone is wildly uneven, the Beckett-like inertia sitting strangely alongside the languid, poetic misery of vintage Williams and more strangely still alongside the Noël Coward-esque theatrical bitchery the siblings descend into during lighter moments, and the plot of the play-within-a-play bleeds in and out of the actor’s real lives to bewildering effect.
And yet, despite all that, The Two Character Play proves oddly compelling and haunting, like a theatrical fever-dream that never fully wakes up. It may be too strange and just plain hard work for some theatregoers, but it is impossible to write off.
Director Sam Yates has thrown everything bar the kitchen sink at it in technical terms, from Lee Curran’s evocative lighting, Daniel Balfour’s threatening sound design, to ingenious, occasionally terrifying video work by Akhila Krishnan and an inspiredly jumbled set by Rosanna Vyze that renders the Hampstead stage simultaneously cavernous and claustrophobic, and the overall effect is pretty astonishing. This is an intensely theatrical experience right up to the almost apocalyptic conclusion where we glimpse just how desperate and lost the central characters actually are.
Far from being overwhelmed by such thrilling, all-encompassing theatricality, actors Kate O’Flynn and Zubin Varla deliver vivid masterclasses in gallows humour and lightning fast transformation between characters, and succeed in building a complex, utterly convincing relationship, rich in mutual loathing and adoration (but mainly loathing!), between these flailing yet self-regarding thespian siblings. Varla gives Felice a sweaty desperation shading into bitter resignation that becomes really moving. O’Flynn delivers her theatrical asides like a young Maggie Smith, and impressively contrasts the gamine-like vitality of the character Clare performs in the ‘Play’ with the dead-eyed despair of Clare herself. Both actors acquit themselves magnificently.
It may seem like an obvious thing to say, but this is the sort of experience you can only have in a theatre. Yes it’s wilfully obscure at times (thanks, Tennessee!) but it also has a boldness and immediacy that would be impossible to replicate in any other medium. The Two Character Play will seldom, if ever, be spoken of in the same breath as, say, The Glass Menagerie or Cat On A Hot Tin Roof – it’s too unwieldy, too esoteric – but Yates and his cracking team make the most persuasive case imaginable for it here.