Mrs. Klein, at the Apollo in London's West End, is an extraordinary kind of theatrical success. It is neither a musical like Les Miserables, nor a chunk of soft-core sentimentality in the style of Peter Shaffer masquerading as a 'serious' play. It is not even an evening of resonant trickery with avant-garde pretensions after the manner of Harold Pinter. What it does is take professionally obsessed people--a species of characters whom in real life one would avoid, because they are personally tedious--and transform them into gripping company for at least the space of an evening. To turn this trick, the playwright is lucky enough to have the assistance of very gifted performers, aided and abetted by first-class design and direction. This combination in a new work from a young playwright, especially a piece from one of the big subsidized houses of London (the National Theatre in this case), is unusual. And if such a work has, like Mrs. Klein, transferred to the British equivalent of Broadway--a commercial theater in London's West End--and there held its own, then the unusual becomes almost wonderful.
The author is Nicholas Wright, a transplanted South African who is now literary manager at the National Theatre, where Mrs. Klein was first staged. Wright once worked at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, and by virtue of that, ought to have very left-wing credentials as a playwright. His presence at the National Theatre suggests that he has. But his credits also include translations of Marivaux and Pirandello, and, perhaps closer to the subsidized theater's fashionable norm, a Balzac adaptation.
For his new play he took up Phyllis Grosskurth's biography of the famous child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. From this material he has crafted a piece of theater in the old-fashioned naturalistic tradition, straightforwardly framed by the proscenium. Wright's characters play out their story in Mrs. Klein's Hampstead consulting room, complete with the classically invisible "fourth wall"; upstage there is a well-filled bookcase including a set of Proust; the practical, or usable furniture includes one splendidly cluttered desk with a working telephone, a table, and an overstuffed chair and sofa (the analyst's couch has not arrived yet); these are flanked on the left side with a lockable sideboard for booze, and on the right by a heavy filing cabinet.
During my own sixteen years in Hampstead I was a guest (though not a patient) in more than one such room, and the atmosphere on the stage of the Apollo was correct enough to evoke the peculiar close memory of musty carpets and curtains. The architecture of the play itself is a perfect match for the set: three-dimensional, and with a text as well made as anything by Harley Granville Barker or Arthur Wing Pinero.
Dangerously Ambivalent
The work of Melanie Klein explored the psyche of early childhood, supposing the presence of extremely complex and rather violent emotions in children at an age when they had previously been considered somewhat blank or at least very simple infants, unambiguously attached to the mother. Mrs. Klein reckoned that the infant, at less than a year old, relates to its mother as an independent, complete, and dangerously ambivalent person, who provokes not only love, but anxiety, frustration, hatred, and destructive urges. It follows that remorse and guilt are also present very early in the child, and are carried intact into adult life--unalienable parts
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