AT THE DONMAR - This Is London
Written in the same year as his more frequently performed ‘Miss Julie’, Strindberg's 1888 drama is also an intimate triangle laying bare the potentially destructive power of sex. It's a more streamlined affair, filled with resentment and recrimination, which shows men and women at their worst - selfish, cruel and unforgiving. David Greig's new version comes across all the more powerfully for being played out on the isolation of Ben Stones' bleached-out, wood-panelled hotel room, surrounded by water.
Tom Burke's Adolph, a successful but now mentally tormented and physically infirm young painter, is an easy target for Owen Teale's Gustav. He takes control from the moment he enters the room, raising the blinds to let in the light and a different perspective, and it's soon apparent that he has a deeper, more personal agenda than Adolph realises.
It's just the kind of role that Alan Rickman would play to perfection, but on this occasion he's directing rather than performing, and Teale does an excellent job of conveying the determined restraint of a damaged man intent on vengeance and on calling in an emotional debt. Though seeming to offer Adolph salvation, his advice - including sexual abstinence - is calculated to have the opposite effect.
Anna Chancellor's novelist Tekla completes the trio. Older than her current husband Adolph (whom she treats as more playmate than partner), younger than Gustav, she craves reassurance that she still has the power to attract. All three suffer, and Rickman's fine, intense production brings out all the vituperative interdependence which typifies Strindberg's embittered view of marriage.
Louise Kingsley
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