Dream Story

****

Director Anna Ledwich has no need of the resources which Stanley Kubrick had at his disposal when he transferred Austrian Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella Dream Story to celluloid and renamed it Eyes Wide Shut. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the content, his disconcerting extravaganza of erotic fantasy and humiliation signalled the end of the relationship of its stars, Tom Cruise and his then wife Nicole Kidman.

With the help of designer Helen Goddard, Ledwich has created a darkly claustrophobic world of sexual misadventure where Luke Neal’s Fridolin, a troubled Viennese doctor, confronts the carnal desires he has kept firmly under wraps until his wife Albertine (Leah Muller) admits to a seemingly harmless fantasy and forces an equivalent confession from him.

Instead of the psychoanalytic theory one would expect from his contemporary, Freud, Schnitzler graphically charts Fridolin’s subsequent nightmarish journey (in which it is never clear how much is real, how much imagined) which threatens the apparent stability of his marriage.

The dreamlike quality is accentuated by the doubling of roles, the anonymous sadism of a masked ball held in the early hours, and the ambiguous, fluctuating nature of the characters whom he encounters on his odyssey – the women (a bereaved daughter, a whore and a prostituted young woman) played by Rebecca Scroggs and the men by a sinister Jon Foster.

With its sliding marital bed and shadowy exits and entrances, this foray into the private, sordid mindscape of a respectable man – and his growing fear of the hold it has on him - proves both uncomfortable and compelling.

Gate, Pembridge Road W11 3HQ (020 7229 0706) Tube: Notting Hill Gate gatetheatre.co.uk Until 16th July
£20