FringeReview UK 2023

The Confessions

National Theatre, London

Genre: Biographical Drama, Contemporary, Drama, Feminist Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, New Writing, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: National Theatre, Lyttelton

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

Anyone who knows Alexander Zeldin’s work will find his The Confessions, playing at the Lyttelton till November 4^th  and directed by him, familiar and strange. It’s engrossing, even with the house lights on throughout.

We’re drawn in to a drama playing with intense naturalism with its own lighting (exquisitely sculpted by Paule Constable) surviving full glare; then the slim set’s deconstructed by stage managers, swivelled round and we jump years in 85 minutes.

It’s different because intensely personal, based in part on Zeldin’s mother’s life. It’s also based on interviews with women aged 80. The result’s a conflated odyssey of womens’ experience, especially those who’ve journeyed from Australia to Europe.

Though there’s not the painstaking real-time unfolding of two hours that marked LOVE; or Faith, Hope and Charity, their overlapping dialogue and hyper-naturalism that makes up – with Past Caring – Zeldin’s trilogy The Inequalities, is there. It’s a quality that’s placed him squarely with US dramatists like Richard Nelson, Amy Herzog, Annie Baker.

But there’s something radically new, both disruptive storylines and – since the play moves from 1943 to 2019 – the way memory moves, allowing a simultaneous onstage doubling of the same older and younger character.

This allows for revisionism, what older Alice would have done, taking charge of her younger self. Or somehow doing what happened with more desultory ease. So as we follow the outwardly unspectacular life of Alice we’re reminded of memory’s operation, and (as characters note) how it alters.

Early scenes unfold with naturalism, settle, before bigger disruptions which (like 1970s theatre) subtly introduce techniques theatre saw at the time, as well as sharply observed dialogue, and costumes by Morg Horwell whose sets too alternate between flimsy realist and wonderfully subverted, continually taken apart.

Older Alice (Amelda Brown) starts as narrator drawing aside plush curtains (there’s initially an inner set too) in a story-like gesture that’s also the school hall where in 1959 younger Alice (Eryn Jean Norvill) meets glamorous Europe-bound Susie (Gabrielle Scawthorn) who reappears through throughout, and already-embittered Pat (Lili Lesser in her first role) as we glimpse future husband Graham (Joe Bannister) -someone her mother Peg (Pamela Rabe) pressures her to marry.

That’s after she fails her first university year in a painful scene with painter father Bob (Brian Lipson) vaguely refusing to champion Alice’s aspirations, yet providing artistic grit that motivates Alice. But the academic tug lingers.

Zeldin’s traced particular character types so an actor embodies a DNA-like trait that haunts Alice – and sometimes the opposite, as Rabe takes raucous 1969 neighbour Viv then explosive feminist Eva: but subtly there’s Eva’s response to trauma: “All it is is bad sex, babe. Move on.” You realise the same bad faith is pushed, from a wholly different angle.

Similarly Lipson returns as Freddy, famous painter hosting and complicit in what happens to Alice when Terry acts, just as Bob was in Alice’s being forced elsewhere (though Lipson has a chance to redeem this arc so to speak). In particular Bannister plays at first diffident then controlling naval officer husband Graham; then as Marxist lecturer Terry a sexually sinister role.

In between there’s a riotous set-scene where neighbour Viv, mercurial and ineffectual husband Eldon (Joe Killick) and hesitant gate-crasher Leigh (Yosser Zadeh in his main role) – both empathic and instantly loathed by Graham – join him and Alice. It’s a dinner beautifully calibrated: gradually raucous, cross-purposed, joyous where Alice dances herself to a drunk delirium.

It’s the first crisis, and 1973’s equally well-caught still in this naturalist bubble, Melbourne speech rhythms evoked (dialect coaches Louise Jones and Jenny Kent), in Alice’s new life studying for a Fine Art Masters with free-love lecturer Joss (Killick), where Bannister’s charismatic doctrinaire dismissive Terry, Susie and Leigh all drift in (how these characters’ lifestyles dovetail at faculty parties hardly matters) as following the most harrowing fallout I’ve seen on stage: ritualised, literally stripping actors to a vulnerability that outstares us.

After an assault offstage (much use of bathrooms throughout) younger Alice is replaced and witnesses her older self take charge. It’s a complex revision of something terrible, a lesson that has to be seen. Just previously, people who should have confronted have merely made noises: Eva, Josh and Susie who summarises: “Martins is the darling of the faculty.” It’s Alice’s birthday; therapy’s enacted.

In between there’s a painful scene where Alice ferociously repudiates Peg though still later writes to her father (who’s partially culpable). It’s this that suggests why we find a last word in the play is so moving.

Zeldin’s telegraphed Alice’s more fulfilled life through Europe and London from 1982 studying social care and art, in a library. Lipson’s witty, self-deprecating Viennese emigré Jacob inhabits a genuine not evasive diffidence; but this time Alice claims him as husband and father of her children.

Zeldin’s ensured that Alice’s progress has inverted her role completely. The parallels with Zeldin’s own life (his father, even his year of birth) are worked in, with a certain telescoping of these years. By 1997 and 2001 her sons Robbie (Zadeh) Leander (Lesser, and as Alice’s interlocutor in 2019) seem people Alice works through. The end’s as far from naturalism as Zeldin’s taken: a monologue involving pelicans. Foals vocalist Yannis Philippakis’s music does add a numinous sonance, with Josh Anio Grigg’s sound relaying pop.

The more one recalls this arc, emphasis on 1969-73, with two disastrous parties, the more it’s clear Zeldin’s moved from the unfolding of previous narratives. Imogen Knight’s movement, Ingrid Mackinnon’s intimacy directing, as well as Kate Waters’ fight scenes, render this a jagged three-dimensioned take on a life that moves to the universal; but not through zero-hour contracts, hostel survivors of government or community work.

Amongst a perfectly-pitched ensemble Scawthorn, Rabe, Bannister, Lesser and Lipson stand out in bravura and range. Brown and Norvill though are quietly mesmerising: drawing you in with both simplicity of means and nuance in reserve, they’re both outstanding.

The title alluding to a blink-moment of Rousseau’s The Confessions underscores this. My one caveat is the text’s signalling years the audience can’t see. With such theatre-business already, deft chronology-projection won’t jar.

Though not the ordinary made phenomenal, Zeldin’s touchstone, it’s an outstanding personally-inflected testament and striking advance.

Published October 24, 2023October 25, 2023 by Simon Jenner