LIFE x 3

LIFE x 3

Full Circle at the Cramphorn Theatre

18.02.12

Yazmina Reza's elegantly structured piece imagines an awkward social situation in three lights. It's not purely domestic, though in the English version this aspect seems to work most happily, but also professional, academic and romantic. A bedtime apple in counterpoint with astrophysics.

Like three variations on a theme, the versions develop different sub-themes, showing how a small change can make a big difference. The dressing-gown is retained or removed, Monday's lunch is off or on, Henri's career is advanced or doomed, six-year-old Arnaud is a monster or a prodigy.

An ambitious undertaking for Full Circle, and not only because of the risk of jumping the rails. These four actors have to convince us that they are real people, all three times, and high-powered French intellectuals to boot. I particularly rated Julia Curle's Inez, the wife of the insufferably arrogant and patronizing Hubert [Christopher Poke]. Worrying about her laddered stocking, expounding on the role of Man in the Cosmos, sharing her views on childcare, all her moods were capably portrayed, in various stages of inebriation, her awful husband's flirting/infidelity leaving her unaware/wounded according to the version.

Hubert is matched for cynicism and self-assurance by Henri's wife Sonia, played here with a nicely superior smile by Lucy Lawson. Though I have to say she didn't persuade me that she was a successful lawyer, any more than Henri [Dave Hyett] persuaded me that he was a rising astrophysicist. But he was excellent in the Ayckbourn territory of social and domestic discomfort [the "suburban whingeing" of the text ?], with well-timed dialogue. His lugubrious depressive moods were tellingly suggested, too.

Sancerre-fuelled insults, crap food, with bile sloshing around and a wind of madness blowing through a symmetrically stylish flat. Andrew Lindfield's production used the space well, the placing of the characters a significant factor in these enigmatic variations.

Many critics feel that Christopher Hampton is the stronger partner in these English versions. Reza is often quoted as finding them too funny. The core problem here, I suggest, is one of culture and language. I find that Hampton's idea of Englishing a text is to pepper it with profanities, and otherwise let the literal translation [which I assume he works from] stand. But these people are still French, still live in Montparnasse and work in French academia. And I would want the language to reflect that. "To be served" is not the same as "being waited on". "English" often means "British", and "size" is not the same as "stature". But I did like the Disney "Fox and Hound". No music in the flat save for this mini-cassette in Arnaud's bedroom, helpfully quoted at the curtain call:

Life's a happy game
You could clown around forever
Neither one of you sees
your natural boundaries
Life's one happy game