Dundee Rep
3 stars
In these hi-tech days of texting, sexting and social media immediacy,
it's hard to credit the power of an old-fashioned hand-written love
letter and the yearningly painful gaps between each exchange. This
probably wasn't what American playwright AR Gurney was thinking when he
penned this Pulitzer Prize nominated two-hander about two people who
retain an intimacy across half a century of billets-doux, but it does
explain its popularity.
So, however, does the play's status as a star vehicle, as many of those
who packed the theatre to see former Dempsey and Makepeace TV double
act and real life husband and wife Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber in
action would no doubt bear witness to. Not that there's much action, as
the pair sit at separate tables to give voice to the life-long romance
between the dependably dull Andrew and the more mercurially
self-destructive Melissa.
From the moment Andrew accepts an invitation to Melissa's second grade
birthday party, a bond is formed between them that moves from teenage
flirtation to bad marriages to other people and beyond. In a classic
portrait of opposites attracting, where Andrew turns to law, then
politics, Melissa becomes a successful artist until her fragile state
of being finally gives up the ghost.
While affecting enough in Ian Talbot's production set against a stage
wall image of skyscrapers at night, as Brandon and Barber move from the
pair's initial juvenalia to the everyday tragedies of their later
years, it's more reading than theatre. Only in the last twenty minutes
do sparks really start to fly in a sad and funny portrait of an affair
that only latterly went beyond the words that defined it.
The Herald, May 9th 2013
ends
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