The Jewish Chronicle
Review: Mrs Klein
Nicholas Wright’s play suggests there is nothing more dysfunctional than a family of quacks.
November 5, 2009 11:40
By, John Nathan
1 min read
Nicholas Wright’s play suggests there is nothing more dysfunctional than a family of quacks.
November 5, 2009 11:40ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
I read somewhere that psychiatrists are more often attracted to their subject by their own condition than those of other people. And Nicholas Wright’s 1988 play suggests there is nothing more dysfunctional than a family of quacks.
His heroine is the real-life pioneering Jewish child psychiatrist Melanie Klein, and the play explores the effect on a mother-child relationship when maternal love is replaced by scientific curiosity.
Set in 1934, and in a blood-red Hampstead drawing room, the play serves as therapy session for its eponymous heroine (a superb Clare Higgins looking rather like Golda Meir) whose son, Hans, recently died.
Klein held that the best therapists had to be cruel to be kind. So will her psychologist daughter Melitta (Zoe Waites) tell her mother the truth about Hans’s death? Or is Melitta simply motivated by revenge for her own and Hans’s loveless childhood?
Caught in the middle is Paula (Nicola Walker), yet another Jewish psychologist, who has found refuge from the Nazis as Klein’s assistant.
No thought is unexpressed, every action is interpreted. Thea Sharrock’s production is beautifully acted, but unlike Tom Kempinski’s Duet For One, recently seen here, Wright finds no room for a sceptic’s view of psychology. But a play with the marvellous exchange — Melitta: “So no hard feelings?” Mrs Klein: “Not on a conscious level” — has to be recommended.
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