A DARK SERENISSIMA
No pretty biscuit-tin Venice here, but rather its ancient darkness: Jess Curtis’ artful set offers stark steps, corners, slotted openings into which half-glimpsed figures come and go; reflections glimmer in the water-shiny floor and backcloth, sometimes there’s an indistinct vast face. A brooding soundscape at first gathers only round a small child, spotlit, peacefully drawing for five uneasy minutes before the thunderclap of loss.
This is Nell Leyshon’s stylish, brooding 100-minute take on Daphne du Maurier’s creepiest, most absurd and almost most famous tale, the 1973 Nicholas Roeg film having burnt into many a susceptible brain the image of a lethal little figure in a red cloak. The adaptor – and director Douglas Rintoul – have the sense not to reproduce any of those images, and indeed Leyson tweaks the tale to focus more on the effect of parental grief. John and Laura are a quintessential modern medium-to-uppermiddle class, down to Sophie Robinson’s neat discreet alice-band never dislodging even during the bed scene. They are in Venice to recover from their five-year-old daughter’s death. Mark Jackson is a confident, preppy John, who has the more difficult task: moving from prosaic husbandly firmness about Laura’s fey credulity, through faints and visions to a state – by the end – of terrified hurtling towards doomwhile figures odd or headless-horrid half appear through the clever set’s openings.
The two weird sisters they encounter are American tourists, Olivia Carruthers leading Alex Bulmer as the blind seer who exalts Laura with a message from the Beyond and infuriates John. Or should he have listened? The pair at first seem oddly wooden, but as the creepiness builds into the swirling darkness of a Venetian night, that works rsther well. After all, surely messages from the Beyond might come as well from Hooterville, Ohio as from Delphi.
Their ordinariness, and the prosaic banter between the central couple as they painfully struggle to connect their different pathways through grief, adds to the brief but useful comic moments as they all give endless trouble to Venetians like the patient receptionist and Alexander Makar in three roles including a nicely pissed-off waiter after John and Laura flee their uneaten risotto. Richard Emerson Gould also has unintrusive fun as the exasperated detective whose investigation into local murders they impede, and occasionally pops up playing the accordion as one of the worrying half-seen figures.
The whole ends with the famous shock – for which – pleasingly – my immediate Ipswich neighbour was wholly unprepared: old Du Maurier’s dark tale’s fame clearly has its limits. But rather beautifully, Jessie Addinnall’s lighting design (which has done much heavy lifting all through) suddenly breaks into the sepulchral bad-dream gloom to give us a fully golden Venetian shine.
Rating 4
Thu 9 – Sat 25 Oct New Wolsey Theatre, Ipswich
Then to the co-producing house:
Wed 29 Oct – Sat 15 Nov Main House, Salisbury Playhouse
Tickets from £12
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