The Times  (London)

Saturday October 23, 1999

Pillow talk that bends the mind

by Benedict Nightingale

They are calling it a "production without decor". Actually, Caryl Churchill's Royal Court production of Wallace Shawn's hour-long 1975 play fills the stage with white beanbags to create the illusion of a Manhattan loft. But

WALLACE SHAWN'S Our Late Night was first staged in New York in 1975, long before he started parading his anguished liberal conscience in such plays as The Fever and The Designated Mourner, both of which involve the undeclared war between the haves and the have-nots. But Caryl Churchill's late-evening production is its British premiere: which is odd, because this short play fizzes with yeasty writing, and not so odd, because the yeast sometimes leaves the organs of understanding in an awful ferment.

The stage at the New Ambassadors is packed with big white pillows - not the most obvious way of evoking a stylish Manhattan apartment. But it means the scene-shifters do not have to labour too hard after the curtain has fallen on Mark Ravenhill's Some Explicit Polaroids. It also indicates that the party being thrown by Ewan Stewart's Lewis and Nancy Crane's Annette is not exactly orthodox.

Nor is it. The banalities of ordinary conversation are occasionally heard, but are mostly drowned by emotional self-exposure that goes way beyond average American psychobabble. If you were to ask Lewis's guests where they lived - still the stock opener over here - they would probably ignore your question and admit to being cannibals, or remember weeping when their mother brought them ice-cream and kissed them goodnight.

It is disorientating, and not only to the audience. Jonathan Cullen's nerdish Jim is clearly looking for a pick-up and receives only crazed brush-offs or worryingly wild come-ons. I mean, what would you say if a lissom blonde suddenly suggested that you cover yourself in searing ointment, "like hot lava", as part of an erotic encounter? The contrast between his conventional reactions and others' lurid streams-of-consciousness makes for some comic moments. But Shawn's serious inference is that we conceal our dark, anarchic drives in most social and personal situations.

Andre Gregory originally directed the piece, a collaboration that was eventually to lead to Shawn's well-known play and film, My Dinner with Andre. Our Late Night hasn't the intellectual scope or excitement of that piece, but it offers interestingly outré opportunities to a cast that includes Andrew Woodall, Jacqueline Defferay and Stephen Dillane, who has several marvellous speeches.

The Daily Telegraph

Monday November 1, 1999

The Arts: Woody Allen meets Virginia Woolf at a party  (an excerpt)

review by Kate Bassett

Books