A PLACE WITHOUT DOORS

Beyond Image Productions at Brentwood Theatre

31.05.10

A bold choice for Beyond Image – an intense, intellectual drama for half-term week. Marguerite Duras' story is based on a real murder. A woman kills her live-in cousin, and drops the dismembered corpse bit by bit from the viaduct into the goods trains below.

The stage version has just two interviews. A patiently probing interviewer [Drew McKenzie, with Freudian beard and homburg] quizzes first the husband, then the murderess, trying to see what underlies the facts, seeking the motive she cannot or will not acknowledge.

Jim Rymer's production was simply staged, subtly suggesting the provincial post-war world in which the tragedy is played out.

A risky strategy to cast relative newcomers as the mysterious couple. Chris Carroll's brief career since his year's training has been mostly in musical theatre, often with his own production company. And the wife as written is 51, with the ménage that ends in murder dragging on for twenty years. But it did bring a raw naivety to the characters, especially Bernadette Necchi's Claire – fragile, cunning, childlike, fiddling with her dress, glancing back at the garden she can never enter again.

The dialogue with the aloof, uncaring Pierre [Christopher Carroll] was often hesitant, pacing round in circles, searching for a question or an answer, with a sometimes unintentional tension between the actors. Of his wife he says: “She talks very strangely, as if she were reciting something.” But this is exactly what he does, too.

A few more pauses might have helped us appreciate the second act, though Claire is often deliberately loquacious. Pierre claims that she is “the place without doors”, “where the wind blows through and sweeps everything away”, but it could also be her garden refuge, with her concrete bench for thinking intelligent thoughts, and the English Mint that gives the original its teasing title …

photography by Minyahil Kifle-Giorgis