Traverse Theatre
Five stars
Fear of the blank page is both the greatest fear and ultimate liberation for every creative writer. It is all too appropriate, then, that Adam Rapp’s slow burning meeting between the minds of two novelists from different generations begins and ends in an empty space.
Our narrator is Bella Lee Baird, a fifty-something Yale creative writing professor with a stage two cancer diagnosis in tow and a back catalogue of three slim volumes. Her story comes in the form of Christopher Dunn, a hyper intelligent if somewhat eccentric student with a Crime and Punishment obsession and a desire to write his own book. As with Bella’s novel, he gives his main character the same name as his own, in a possibly autobiographical yarn that has yet to find an ending.
As Bella recounts her meetings with Christopher, she imbues their fleeting intimacy with an air of mystery that becomes a matter of life and death for them both.
It is easy to see from its UK premiere why Rapp’s play was nominated for six Tony awards during its 2019 Broadway run. The writing is honed to poetic perfection, and the plotting is equally spare.
This gives Matt Wilkinson’s production a gimlet-eyed focus on everything being said. The latter is done in magnificently understated fashion by Madeleine Potter, who brings Bella’s words to life as if she is reading at a spoken word night. This overrides Christopher’s frantic efforts to offload as much as he can in as short a time as possible.
Christopher is played by Eric Sirakian with an initial nerviness that makes Potter’s Bella appear even more precise in her descriptions of what happened. It is a mesmerising encounter that determines who lives to tell the tale in a flawless piece of work.
The Herald, August 9th 2024
Ends
-
Comments