Orange Tree, London
"It's been a strange evening," says a character at the end of Lars Noren's play. That seems an understatement for a work in which a family dinner party turns into a psychological slugfest that even Noren's Swedish mentor, Strindberg, might have balked at. But although the play, written in 1989 and deftly translated by Gunilla Anderman, is about as far from English politesse as you could get, it's well worth experiencing if you have a taste for domestic combat.
It starts mildly enough. Henrik, a doctor, and Margareta, a librarian, are entertaining their daughters, Ann and Ewa, to dinner and rejoicing in being such "a happy, healthy family". But the mood soon turns rancorous as Ann, a hard-up single mum who works as a waitress in a gay bar, starts taking pot-shots at the well-off Ewa and then raves on about the "living hell" of her youth: she feels that her mother's jealousy of her closeness to her father has never been confronted or resolved. This prompts Ewa to agonise about her own stale marriage and infertility, and eventually Henrik and Margareta get in on the act: their marriage, too, it seems, has been a hollow sham held together by habit and indecision.
For all its hyper-realistic surface, Noren's play is highly artificial: each character has an aria of angst before subsiding to allow the others the spotlight. And if, as Noren implies, what we're watching is a regular monthly ritual, you wonder why everyone seems so surprised by these particular revelations. But Noren's play keeps one watching partly because of its sheer emotional intensity and partly because it gradually acquires metaphorical status. Rooted in a world where property equals status, where Ewa's trips to New York symbolise her aspirations to international chic and where everyone is reliant on medication or booze, Noren's play is clearly about some sickness in the Swedish soul and the illusory comforts of bourgeois materialism. Like Festen, it argues that family life is an elaborate mask concealing a profound social and psychological malaise.
Derek Goldby, rarely seen on these shores since his early success with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, directs with a sure grasp of the play's gathering momentum. Lisa Stevenson as the feverish Ann, Kristin Hutchinson as the more rational but equally unhappy Ewa, and Diane Fletcher and Osmund Bullock as their dissatisfied parents also transcend the usual English penchant for dry irony. It's all a bit like Ingmar Bergman without the laughs but, though the evening leaves you emotionally pulverised, it suggests we have unjustly neglected the nerve-jangling Noren.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/may/09/autumn-and-winter-review
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