Lessons in love

THEATRE REVIEW: Honour by Joanna Murray-Smith

Here can be few couples who see this ironic and thought-provoking work who do not leave the theatre pondering the nature of love, examining the texture of their own relationships and questioning their certainties in the light of the issues it raises.

They are issues of passion, of loyalty, of dominance and subservience and, ultimately, of identity. Australian Joanna Murray-Smith (about whom there is, curiously, no information in the programme) raises them in the context of an apparently comfortably cruising 28-year-old marriage shattered in a matter of days on the rocks of infidelity and one partner’s restless need for new challenges.

Heard it before? Of course, it’s the oldest of themes, but what saves the play from cliché is the pace and wit of the writing, the depth of the exploration and the absence of any neat bows tied around the package.

George (Graham Hopkins), a successful journalist and critic, has reached the point in his lifelong career as an interviewer where, at last, he is interesting enough to be the interviewee; to be asked the question all interviewers wait for and few ever hear: ‘What about you, then?” An expert at analysing the words and works of others, he is quite incapable of critically examining or reviewing his own actions.

The interrogator is Claudia (Abena Ayivor), the confident, tough-talking unsentimental and ruthless young writer who determinedly seduces him, first by asking the longed-for question, later by offering passion, but who ultimately, and inevitably, lets him (and herself) down.

And back home are Honor (Fiona Ramsay), once an acclaimed writer in her own right but for many years ‘in service” to her more famous spouse; a woman who, looking back, mourns that ‘I never became all that I might have been”. And there is daughter Sophie (Shelley Meskin), who will learn in the course of the play that security is not a given and she cannot ‘own” her parents.

None of the issues are new or earth-shattering; the questions the play raises have been around ever since the first man and woman joined up to create a couple and a family, and the answers will not solve any of the world’s great social problems, stop wars or end famine. But it is the kind of intelligent and beautifully crafted work that good theatre is all about and it is done a great service by an accomplished cast and a talented director.

Hopkins gives a superbly judged performance, shifting subtly from urbane confidence to tortured self-realisation. Ramsay excels in her portrayal of a sophisticated, witty woman, far cleverer than her husband but ultimately vulnerable and dependent upon being depended upon. ‘Who do I look after now?” is her agonised cry as he leaves her. Ayivor’s debut stage appearance is easy and assured, and Meskin sensitively portrays the bewilderment of the young woman suddenly deprived of all her certainties.

The play is faultlessly directed by Alan Swerdlow with a fine sense of the timing on which it depends for its success.