Neil LaBute’s latest play, in which a
middle-aged widower addresses us in a chapel of rest, is an unfussy
monologue but none the less full of clever distractions. Why does
Edward Carr, viewing the casket with us (designer Lucy Osborne has made
the entire space over nicely), keep making references to the
unintelligible sounds of speech we can hear from offstage as being the
sound of himself giving the formal eulogy… and, moreover, (I think he
said at one point) doing so tomorrow? This, it turns out, is a complete
red herring: unexplained and irrelevant.
Then there is the title. Are these wrecks the classic cars he and his
rather older wife hired out as a business? The road crash which
miraculously did not kill them? His own early life in the fostering
system? The cancer-racked bodies of himself and his late wife? (He is
an unapologetic smoker.) His company, as he expects it to be torn apart
by his children after his own death? And most bewildering of all, where
is the characteristic shock? True, when Carr speaks of his marital sex
life, his reminiscences cause him to turn away and, as the euphemism
has it, adjust his dress. But really, nothing seems disconcertingly
wrong with the picture, which is very un-LaBute. This is a playwright,
after all, whose early work
Bash
updated some of the more harrowing Greek myths. Surely the wife’s death
will turn out to be murder, or suicide at the discovery of something
dark in Carr’s past, or at the very least assisted suicide… is LaBute
going soft?
No, he isn’t. I put the pieces together just in time, but as Carr says
when he unveils it himself, “Maybe you’re a whole lot smarter’n me.”
Greek adaptations… man of uncertain parentage… older wife… and “Wrecks”
becomes “Rex” and there can only be one
rex in such a context. At last the
picture is wrong in the right way. It is the satisfaction of working
out a whodunnit, and in much the same way, this pleasure is greater
than any concomitant literary delight. LaBute is good, but not
terrific. Josie Rourke’s direction is low-key and Robert Glenister’s
performance disarming in a sombre kind of way, until you finally get
all those little niggles arranged in a line and it becomes blindingly
obvious. Look, there’s another clue.
Written for the Financial
Times.