“We murder to dissect,” wrote Wordsworth, referring to excessive study
killing our appreciation of the wonders of nature. And what, in its
way, is psychoanalysis but an intense study of personality that stifles
individual quiddities? And how much more stifling might that be when
superimposed on a parent/child relationship? Nicholas Wright’s 1988
play (receiving its first revival in a scrupulous production by Thea
Sharrock) centres on one of the pioneers of child psychiatry, Melanie
Klein, whose professional preoccupations have generated a complex
rivalry with her daughter (also an analyst and one of Klein’s fiercest
critics) and may have led her son to take his own life in 1934. Much of
the play’s psychodrama turns on facts and interpretations regarding
Hans Klein’s final hours.
Claire Higgins’ brilliance at portraying torrents of emotion is matched
by her astuteness in suppressing them. Her Mrs Klein is all about
control, in the senses both of composure and of dominating a situation,
until those moments when she loses it. Yet these are never the points
when she is most overtly goaded by her daughter Melitta (who is
revealed to be the Dr Schmideberg about whom Klein has been so
vitriolic before her arrival) nor more discreetly manipulated by newly
arrived colleague Paula Heimann, who seems to have her sights set on
supplanting Melitta as Klein’s "daughter". Nicola Walker as Paula grows
during the evening from a position of ingenuousness to one of
knowledge, analytic adroitness and even a control of her own. Zoë
Waites’ Melitta soon abandons her glacially smiling putdowns of Paula
and, on her mother’s unexpected return home, gets stuck into tussling
with her both personally and professionally.
Wright’s play is clever, amusing and poignant sometimes all at once.
However, I cannot rid myself of a suspicion that it is inextricably
middle-class. Just as Klein and, later, Freud himself settled in
Hampstead, so there feels to be a class undercurrent to assumptions
about the psychoanalytically literate audience, who can appreciate gags
such as Klein using a three-drawer filing cabinet for subjects she
classifies as “ego”, “superego” and “id”. Despite the rise in estimates
of the number of us who suffer from mental illness at one time or
another, it is still often seen as something of a luxury to be able to
afford to have such problems.
Written for the Financial
Times.