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RSC
The Cordelia Dream
Written by Marina Carr
Directed by Selina Cartmell
Designer GILES CADLE
Wilton Music Hall
11 December 2008 – 10 January 2009
A review by Alice MacKenzie for EXTRA! EXTRA!
Cronus, King of the Titans, sits swallowing his children whole for fear of the one that would overthrow him. Oedipus’ father ordered his new born baby killed in an attempt halt a prophecy in which his son would replace him on his throne and in his bed. When did we stop talking about the jealous father who sees his own child not as an object of pride, but an awful competitor? We are fine with sibling rivalry; and the wicked step-mother or mother-in-law are stock characters. But we seem to have written out as unacceptable the child gobbling parent. In Marina Carr’s The Cordelia Dream, an old man, a composer, lives hermit-like in a one-room apartment, his solitude broken twice by the entrance of a woman. Their first conversations are combative, provocative; they talk of times past and of music. The woman becomes jealous of the “women” who are now the man’s lovers, looking after him in the morning, making him coffee. Their bodies seem to reveal them as old lovers: the sexual tension in the way they stand too far apart or suddenly too close, a look, and the control in their bodies. So convinced am I, that even when she places herself in a dream as Cordelia to his Lear I imagine it as the metaphorical father/daughter relationship of the teacher to the pupil. Until she refers to him as her father. And it is at this point that the play hardens as a tale of jealous hatred and loving admiration, in which director Selina Cartmill seems to emphasize a touch of the Oedipal myth with the Woman as Oedipus and Man as both father and mother. Michelle Gomez, of Greenwing fame, plays the Woman, Oedipus, Cordelia, Goneril. She is the composer daughter whose success haunts her failing father, and whose father in turn publically and viciously haunts her. In the first act she finds him in order to try and banish his ghost from her life through reconciliation. As they talk through their lives together, the love and hatred between them twists ever tighter around itself. The Woman is the insatiable daughter hungry to learn from her father, and perhaps in her admiration, to become him. In Selina Cartmell’s direction of the play, Gomez dresses in her fathers discarded concert clothes. The audience is left to wonder if this is the Woman’s fantasy or the Man’s own. When in the second act David Hargreaves Man has descended into madness, it is she, his daughter, which haunts him. The realism of the dialogue and the gentle madness and obsession of the first half, seemed to make the dramatic madness of the second half a bit of a surprise. Although at some points it felt a little comic, it reminded me that I was watching a play inspired by Shakespeare, where the tragic heroes are left to descend to dizzying depths. The Man’s jealousy is immense and stems from his own feeling of unacknowledged genius. In his eyes his daughter has “stolen his gift”, as Oedipus steals the throne and wife from his father. His jealousy first destroys his wife, as he locks the piano so that she may no longer play, and then seeks to silence his daughter. David Hargreaves’ Man is open-faced to the point of cruelty, his frustration, delusion, and narcissistic boyishness almost naïve. In his madness too he is startlingly open: he wanders around his stark apartment, curls up on the piano like a foetus to sleep, conducts imaginary audiences with the light of joy on his face, and is fearful and confused in the face of his demons. Despite being a destructive, selfish force, his open fragility allows the audience a hint of pity for him too. Contrastingly, Gomez as Woman is a little too dramatic in her sighs and pauses. She comes across as harder somehow, and colder. It seems that she wishes to be his daughter, his lover, his mother all at once. “The most beautiful thing in [his] life”. By the second half her character suggests a closed resignation to her fate, and a wry tenderness to the man who demanded it. In this moment she is perhaps more Cordelia. Silencing herself out a love for her father, a love which he felt consumed by? In his senility the old man plays her entire collection of compositions of by heart. The hauntings take place on a wooden stage perched on stilts in the shell of Wilton’s Music Hall. A theatre of peeling paint, Wilton’s has holes in the walls where the building shows its wooden ribs. It seems fitting that this play of ghosts and frustrated ambitions takes place here. Giles Cadle’s sparse wooden set feels both as though it’s a transient, make-shift object, and a bit of scaffolding forming a part of the crumbling building. TV’s rest like eyes or owls around the corners of the room. Strangely, these TV’s only feature in the first few minutes of the play and then seem to disappear, as though they have been forgotten about. Is this a link to the outside world that has been cut off? Either way, forgotten or metaphorical, abandoning the TV’s so rapidly after they had caught the audience’s attention seemed odd. It was as if they were something waiting to speak, but never quite sure when they should join in. The room is dominated by a grand piano around which the Man lives his life, and a gaping door through which he never leaves. The old Man remains in the space from before the audience enter to the moment of the final bow, listening to the sound score of rain and the strings of the live musicians playing unseen somewhere hidden. Fergus O’Hare’s sound-score seems to hollow out the space even further, making it feel emptier, lonelier. As the Man twists and turns in his insomnia, and later his frustrated madness, the high-ceilinged faded decadence seems somehow to be a part of him. The Cordelia Dream is a compelling balance of the mythical and the modern, nestled into this magical space.
Bookings and Information: 0844 800 1118 or www.rsc.org.uk Tickets: £20. For selected performances £15 Concessions and £10 Stand-by tickets are also available. Please see website above for details. Theatre: Wilton’s Music Hall, Graces Alley, Off Ensign Street, London, E1 8JB
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ary Couzens