Theatre
Theatre review: Switzerland
Tension is high in this play about the author Patricia Highsmith
November 29, 2018 17:09
1 min read
Tension is high in this play about the author Patricia Highsmith
November 29, 2018 17:09"There are worse things in life than tragedy,” says Patricia Highsmith (Downton Abbey’s Phyllis Logan) in Joanna Murray-Smith’s tense two-hander about the popular author. “It gives you texture, unless it kills you.”
She says this to Edward (Calum Finlay), a young emissary from Highsmith’s American publishers sent from New York to Highsmith’s Swiss chalet. He has come to persuade her to write one more novel about the serial killer she created for the series of books that began with The Talented Mr Ripley.
The walls of Highsmith’s “bunker”, to which she retreated in the years before she died in 1995, are festooned with antique but lethal swords, which gives Lucy Bailey’s production the air of a country-house thriller. It has a whiff of Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth and, rather like that play, the tension here is derived from the sense that the visitor may not survive the host.
It is like watching a lamb go to slaughter. Diffident Edward’s attempts to flatter the irascible Highsmith into signing a contract are met with a slew of withering put-downs that could destroy her visitor as efficiently as the double-barrelled Derringer she strokes like a cat.
She is not what you might call a people person. Jews are especially disliked; top of the list of things she hates about New York.
But the play delves more deeply than your average thriller. The question investigated here is not whodunit but the relationship between author and character. In this case, the latter wouldn’t have existed without the former; the former couldn’t live without the latter. And both have a hole where their compass should be.
Murray-Smith forges a twist that Highsmith would have enjoyed. And Logan’s warts’n’all performance terrifically conveys an intellect that doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or indeed at all. The key to the evening is that the play does for Highsmith what Highsmith did for Ripley. That is to say there is much to dislike about both of them, and yet, without choosing to, you find yourself with no other option but to be on their side.