For one moment in the first scene, you
wonder whether writer Nina Raine has unexpectedly gone all
grand Guignol. Two couples are
celebrating a new baby and engaging in banal chat about family, where
to site the sofa in the new living room etc., when the conversation
turns to “What have you been doing lately?” and suddenly they’re all
talking about committing rapes and murders. But no, it transpires that
they’re barristers using verbal shorthand to refer to their cases.
Matters settle down into that now generally outmoded genre, the
“adultery in NW3” play (all right, to be precise NW1).
However, this is an exceptional example of the form and goes much
deeper. Unfaithfulness – real, attempted and imagined – amongst these
two couples and a third seethes with issues of morality and emotional
engagement, nicely contrasted between private and professional lives.
Through it all reverberates that title, especially when the one court
case we see becomes echoed in the matter of marital rape. Even the
non-lawyer character, an actress, is playing Medea.
Raine is such a fine writer that not a moment of it seems contrived,
even the bits which obviously are. In one scene, the actress is asking
two of the male lawyers for advice on playing a barrister; their
explanations about gaining control of the courtroom narrative by tricks
of manner, asking “closed” questions and so on, grow more pointed as
they illustrate matters by examining each other about their respective
secret sexual desires. Yet Raine’s precision as a writer, Roger
Michell’s skills as a director and the performances of Ben Chaplin, Pip
Carter and Daisy Haggard mean that the fabric of naturalism is never
stretched to transparency. Later, Chaplin is also excellent as an
almost Aspergically dispassionate advocate dissolving into inarticulacy
when he finds himself feelingly embroiled in the kind of situation he
has so often tried.
Let me put it this way: this is the kind of play and production in
which the renowned and consummate talents of Anna Maxwell Martin (as
Chaplin’s character’s vengeful wife) merit little more than a passing
mention in the context of everything else that’s going on in terms of
acting, writing and discreet direction. A bit of a beaut all round.
Written for the Financial
Times.