Theatre byDavid Jays
Cate Blanchett, immaculate in a column of grey silk, shudders over the decanters. She speaks in a cultured husk, shivering, clipped and increasingly sepulchral. Toweringly tall, she becomes a neurotic tornado howling round a cramped and dingy flat in Pimlico or, with hair seemingly iced into submission, she staggers like one of the undead, propping herself up in Knightsbridge. An imperious puma curdles into a dopehead marooned in memory.
After her triumphant performance in Shekhar Kapur's film Elizabeth, audiences are excited to see Blanchett in Plenty. She is undoubtedly compelling in David Hare's 1978 time-shuttling chronicle of a young resistance agent who finds only betrayed ideals and compromising subterfuge in postwar Britain. Although an indictment of perfidious England, the role of Susan always attracts foreign interpreters - the Canadian Kate Nelligan created the role and Meryl Streep starred in the subsequent movie. Blanchett's accent is fine (upper-class life is, in any case, an elaborate form of charades), but her tremulous, head-twitching performance makes Susan a delirious casualty, quivering in a leaf-green suit.
The appearance of film stars in stage roles has become one of the most notable trends of the hype-happy 1990s, an apparently foolproof cash-for-cred venture. Kevin Spacey apart, most of these performers are female (evidence of the continuing lack of demanding screen roles for women), and it is interesting to consider the gilded cages that theatres construct for their exotic prizes. Juliette Binoche starred in Naked (as a distraught woman surrounded by hypocrites); Isabelle Huppert as Mary, Queen of Scots (distraught woman surrounded by Machiavellians); Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room (disrobed woman surrounded by theatre critics).
Each of these talented performers, like Blanchett, was required to display flesh, tears or mental instability, for watching movie stars has increasingly become a Bedlam entertainment. We drag them from their expansive screens, confine them on a stage and poke sticks at them until they cry. The uses of widescreen enchantment become a thrilling theatrical freak show.
Plenty doesn't have to be like that: Susan is more satirist than hysteric, as much political as pathological. Blanchett subdues the character's mischief and behaves like she's immured in the House of Usher, while Jonathan Kent's elegant production smooths her path to doomy divadom. An ethereal soprano vocalises between scenes, while Maria Bjornson's set shutters open and close like a cruel lens (reflecting Blanchett's screen fame and, more pertinently, the jump- cut structure of what Hare has described as "a film-script for the stage"). Everything suggests that Susan is too good for this world but mercilessly trapped within it.
Hare's heroines are often problematic. He clearly likes women: even the dedications to his plays are memorably uxorious, and Nicole Farhi has recently been favoured with "Pour mon amour" and "A la folie". He is perhaps the first male playwright of his generation consistently to make women the lightning-conductors of his analysis of the English condition. From Maggie in Teeth 'n' Smiles (1975) to Amy in Amy's View (1997), they are saintly observers or highly strung prophetesses. When Susan goes to pieces, she's cracking up for England.
Gawping at the crazy lady is a fin-de-siecle pursuit. Two nights after Plenty, I was threading through the time-stopped chambers beneath St Pancras, watching the Seven Sisters Group perform an ineffably creepy take on Salome. Brainsick decadents hurled themselves at mirrors, gurned in doorways, gurgled, howled and beckoned. Our voyeurism flushed from its habitual darkness, we hugged the walls, apart from one woman who began out-spooking the performers, tapping at their looking-glass, draping them with tatty wigs. Happy the show that induces psychosis in its audience; it makes a change from peering from the shadows at the monstrous feminine.
"Plenty" continues until 10 July at the Albery Theatre, St Martin's Lane, London WC2 (0171-369 1730)
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