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What's Playing in London

As You Desire Me
at the Playhouse

by Kelly Monaghan

Kristen Scott Thomas' face, all languorous slants and angles, fills the proscenium arch at the beginning of Jonathon Kent's smashing revival of As You Desire Me at the Playhouse. It's a fitting metaphor for the production as a whole because her performance towers over all else in this spot-on rendition of Luigi Pirandello's elaborate clockwork mechanism of a melodrama.

I've never been a big Pirandello fan. There seems to be a paint-by-the-numbers aspect to the elaborate modernist conceits he builds to play with his ideas. Fascinating ideas they are, but the plays always betray the artifice, remaining, for me at least, resolutely untheatrical. And the lurid plot twists, which must have seemed ever so daring in their day, are a little bit ludicrous today.

But there were precious few matinees on offer this London Sunday. I'd seen Lion King and the only other likely choice was something called Education of A Lap Dancer. How would I explain that to my wife? So off to the Playhouse I went and I'm glad I did.

As You Desire Me is familiar even stereotypical Pirandello as it asks "Can we believe what we think is real, let alone what we wish were true?"

A sultry Berlin cabaret singer is living in a studiously depraved ménage with the toad-like man who keeps her and his besotted lesbian daughter, when an Italian gentleman arrives to inform her that she is the long-missing Lucia, wife of a gallant Italian officer who awaits her at her villa near Venice. During the first World War, we learn, she had been gang raped by marauding German troops, a catastrophe that produced amnesia and a hitherto unexplained disappearance.

Reunited with her adoring husband, she seems destined for a sort of rebirth into a life of ease. But this is a Pirandello play, after all, so doubts as to her identity and the motives of those who embrace her arise. Since the estate is in Lucia's name, the husband has a decided economic interest in finding his long lost wife and who in the family wouldn't want this ravishing beauty as a relative? The plot thickens with the arrival of a traumatized, withered, almost mute shell of a woman who just might be the real Lucia (an echo, perhaps, of Pirandello's insane and institutionalized wife).

This is the stuff of soap opera, complete with botched suicides and telltale birthmarks, but Pirandello makes intellectual sport of the conventions to explore the mysteries of identity and the pressing human need to believe what we want to believe, regardless of the facts, and then impose those beliefs on others. In this case, Pirandello and his heroine (known as L'Ignota or the Unknown), opt for the facts, brutal though they may be.

I have no idea to what extent Hugh Whitemore's new version departs from the Italian original, but it works remarkably well, even if it never shakes off Pirandello's creaky stagecraft.

Best of all is the opportunity it provides Thomas who turns in a tour de force that has Olivier Nominated written all over it. At one moment she is Marlene Deitrich, at another an Erte flapper sprung to life, at another a Shavian heroine making Pirandello's convoluted philosophizing sparkle. She is simply superb and it is hard to imagine the play working half as well in less capable hands.

Bob Hoskins is less successful as the foul man who keeps her. He growls his way through the part without ever suggesting either the humanity or the charisma that would explain L'Ignota's perverse loyalty to him.

For his part, director Jonathon Kent has orchestrated the whole affair admirably, ending each scene in this intermissionless exercise with a striking tableau and eliciting perfect gems of performances from the lesser characters.

The Playhouse makes a pretty and intimate setting for the piece. Afterwards, I strolled along Victoria Embankment, through Westminster in search if a good Indian restaurant, a perfect end to a stimulating afternoon in the theater.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

Box office - 0870 060 6631
Tickets £17.50 to £42.50
Booking through January 22, 2006
web site

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What's Playing in London

As You Desire Me at the Playhouse

by Kelly Monaghan

As You Desire Me
at the Playhouse