HOME PAGE SITE GUIDE SEARCH REVIEWS REVIEW ARCHIVES ADVERTISING AT CURTAINUP FEATURES NEWS Etcetera and Short Term Listings LISTINGS Broadway Off-Broadway NYC Restaurants BOOKS and CDs OTHER PLACES Berkshires London California New Jersey DC Connecticut Philadelphia Elsewhere QUOTES TKTS PLAYWRIGHTS' ALBUMS LETTERS TO EDITOR FILM LINKS MISCELLANEOUS Free Updates Masthead Writing for Us |
A CurtainUp London Review
Fatal Attraction
James Dearden has adapted his screenplay for the stage and has given it a different ending. Not even the great director Trevor Nunn can get high drama out of this story, as he did with his recent production of Scenes From a Marriage. The opening scene is wonderful. A throng of New Yorkers mill about and one man is thrust forward out of the crowd into the limelight and then isolated centre stage as he moves to a beautifully lit bar and pours out his story to a drinking friend. He narrates his history at the same time as re-enacting it. The foreknowledge is evidenced by the first time the word rabbit is used when Dan talks about his daughter's desire for a pet. This elicits the cross between a sigh and a groan from the audience in anticipation of the sorry end for the fluffy pet. The other problem for me seemed to be the rapidity with which Natascha McElhone's Alex Forrest shows her nasty and mentally unstable side. The morning after Dan goes back to Alex's apartment after meeting her in a bar, fucking her in an elevator and going to a nightclub, he gets dressed quietly and sneaks back to his own house. His wife and daughter are staying with his mother in law in the country and of course the next day he feels like shit and questions why he has betrayed his wife and his family. The phone calls start immediately from Alex asking what happened and why he left. That night he goes back and instantly she is asking where she stands with him, only the second time they have met. Within minutes she is wielding a large knife and has slashed her wrists to the strains of Puccini's Madame Butterfly. But do we care about either of them? Or more pertinently, do we believe either of them? Have they not heard about AIDs in 1987 New York or do they think that AIDs only affects the gay population? He decides to move out of the city and as they put their apartment on the market, he finds his wife showing round his angry stalking Nemesis. It is a good scene watching him squirm in front of his unknowing wife. Sets of neon strip blue archways like those in Curious Incident and sliding panels allow set changes before more attacks getting closer and closer to his family with lies creating more and more of a problem. Mark Bazeley who was in Scenes From a Marriage is good enough but the very pretty Miss McElhone doesn't have the sinister chill of a Glenn Close and Kristin Davies has a moral high ground part with little depth. But what does it all convey? The wages of sin is death? Adulterers come to a sticky end? Or beware before you adapt films for the stage?
|
|