Review: Grasses Of A Thousand Colours - The Jewish Chronicle

“Do you happen to be interested in the topic of sex?” asks Cerise. “If not, seriously, please get out of here.”

Cerise (Miranda Richardson) is the wife of Ben (Wallace Shawn), an aging scientist, industrialist, philanthropist and memoirist whose meanderings and musings — and that of Cerise, Robin (Hollywood actress Jennifer Tilly) and Rose (Emily McDonnell), the three women in his life — make up an evening of surreal, absurdist and, in the description, though never in the enactment, often quite revolting sexual imagery.

So best to take Cerise’s warning seriously before buying a ticket, or even reading this review.

It took Shawn — the American playwright and actor in whose honour the Royal Court is staging an entire season — 10 years to write this, his latest play. It reunites the author with director Andre Gregory, whose collaboration with Shawn goes back to the 1981 film My Dinner With Andre, which started out as a play on this very stage.

It is tempting to say that this three-and-a-quarter hour evening feels as long to watch as it took to write. The text is almost entirely delivered as a series of monologues — never the most engaging form of theatre. But there are undeniable leaps of imagination that transport the viewer or, just as appropriately, the listener. For the descriptions of Shawn’s world, in which cats and donkeys banquet like medieval feudal lords, would serve radio at least as well, and probably better, than the stage.

Designer Eugene Lee’s sparsely furnished space suggests a Victorian drawing room. A long white sofa is book-ended by a couple of lamps. And the inference drawn from the wooden lectern is that we are here not for a play, but a lecture.

Our host is Ben, a role for which the short, bald-on-top, grey-at-the sides Shawn is dressed in decadent raconteur garb, a pervy ensemble of black satin dressing gown, polka dot cravat and silk pyjamas.

His address is interrupted by strange video diaries from his wife Cerise which appear to be the last surviving transmissions from a gathering apocalypse. Ben decides to dump the formality and, variously sprawled on the sofa or pacing around the furniture, tells his fantastical story.

It serves partly as a cautionary tale about the environment and part adult fairytale. But it reminded me also of John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick, only here the female characters are cast as alluring muses to Shawn’s sexually rampant gnomic gnome.

What tension there is derives mainly from waiting to learn about the nature of the apocalypse. The world portrayed is one in which food is not just scarce but poisonous. An ingredient eaten one day will kill you the next. Most humans survive on government-manufactured pastes or they risk dying like the animals around them, wracked with pain and vomiting to death.

So is Shawn’s enigmatic message a warning about impending environmental catastrophe? Partly. Maybe. But there is a good deal of what feels like gratuitous taboo-busting too.

Ben speaks with fondness of the good ol’ days when children and parents did not masturbate in front of each other. Well this is, after all, the author who in the 1970s wrote the rarely-produced A Thought in Three Parts, which is often described as part-play and part-pornography.

Here there are explicit descriptions of sex between our host, his three lovers and one more muse, a cat with magical powers called Blanche.

Now, there is a plot twist which might make all this somewhat less shocking in retrospect. And before bestiality is declared too taboo for the stage, let us remember that Edward Albee’s acclaimed Who is Sylvia? explored the relationship between a man and a goat, and with it the boundaries of liberal attitudes.

But despite the testimonials from British writers like David Hare and Caryl Churchill, Shawn is no Albee. And although there are moments here that conjure a world that makes ours, despite all the hell-in handcart predictions, seem like a place we should all be grateful to live in, this worthy lesson is a pretty small return for a play that takes three-and-a-quarter hours. And it is hardly revelatory. The inescapable conclusion is one of self-indulgence.