THEATRE
THE LOVER
ROYAL LYCEUM, EDINBURGH
Reviewed by Mark Brown
Since he took the reins as artistic director at the Lyceum in 2016, renowned dramatist David Greig has received merited plaudits for the boldness of his programming. However, brave and ambitious though it is, it seems unlikely that The Lover, a dance-theatre adaptation of Marguerite Duras‘s award-winning, autobiographical novel, will go down as a high point of his tenure.
The piece is a co-production between the Lyceum, Scottish Dance Theatre and Scotland’s women’s theatre company Stellar Quines. It is adapted jointly by its co-directors, choreographer Fleur Darkin and theatre director Jemima Levick.
Stage adaptations of famous novels are much too common in British theatre. That said Duras’s story of a love affair in French colonial Indochina, which is illicit on grounds of both age (the girl is just 15) and ethnicity (she is white French, he is Chinese), should offer more to the stage than most prose fictions. After all, there is in the novel the atmosphere of colonial Saigon, and the powerful psychological and erotic dimensions of the affair, as seen by the girl later in her life.
Between them, however, Darkin and Levick (and Greig, who is credited with “dramaturgy”) have conspired to squander the dramatic possibilities Duras offers them. The piece is not so much a combination of dance and theatre as an unholy collision.
The delicate beauty of designer Leila Kalbassi’s set, which is inspired by the calligraphies and pastoralism of East Asian art, stands in embarrassing contrast with the clunking dreadfulness of the co-directors’ decisions. As the ever-impressive Susan Vidler takes her place on-stage as The Woman (the narrative voice of The Girl later in life), her live narration is intercut, irritatingly and distractingly, with recorded narrative.
Worse-still, the actor-dancers who perform the various roles (including The Girl and The Man), mime their dialogue to exclusively female recorded speech. The intention, no doubt, is to emphasise both the female perspective of the story and its status as memory. The effect, however, is to bury the narrative under the agonising awfulness of the mime.
The dance itself is variable, but too often literal in its metaphors. The crucial sex scene is rendered unintentionally comic by its decidedly unerotic, faux-naked costumes.
Poorly conceived, and even more badly executed, this deeply disappointing offering does no favours to a classic of 20th-century French literature.
Until February 3. Details: lyceum.org.uk
A slightly abridged version of this review was originally published on the website of the Daily Telegraph on January 24, 2018
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/theatre/what-to-see/affair-forget-lover-royal-lyceum-edinburgh/
©Mark Brown
Scottish Stage 