Death of a Long Pig ** TNT
Despite its eye-catching title, Nigel Planer’s new play fails to provide much insight whilst purporting to explore a link between the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson and the French painter Paul Gauguin. Both ended their days, prematurely and short of cash, in the South Pacific – the always sickly Stevenson on Samoa in 1894, the dissolute Gauguin several years later.
In Polynesia, “Long pig” is, apparently, “a white man to be eaten” and although both artists are heading towards their deathbeds, the play’s two very separate acts do not make a satisfying whole.
First, Sean Murray’s feverishly bronchitic Louis is seen happily making detailed preparations for his funeral and treating the Polynesian staff with more concern than he affords his querulous wife Fanny (Amanda Boxer). No sooner is he despatched than we’re transported to Tahiti in 1897 where Gauguin (a persuasive Murray again) is mixing a potentially suicidal cocktail of arsenic and morphine to put himself out of impoverished misery. A mishmash of characters appears (a neighbour, a guitar strumming store keeper, a blind mother-in-law) for no particular reason and the whole thing fizzles out without ever having sparked.
Planer has done his research but scuppers his project with cumbersome dialogue, barely relevant and sketchily drawn minor characters and scant narrative development. Full marks, though, to Alex Marker’s well thought-out set which provides a nifty evocation of ex-pat life on foreign shores.
Finborough, Finborough Road, SW10 9ED. (0844 847 1652) 1st August (£9 - £13)
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