Alice Trilogy ( Archived )

Reviews

Alice Trilogy4 stars Dramatists, as they get older, often do away with the impediments of realism. Tom Murphy here focuses with Beckettian directness on the decline of his eponymous Irish heroine over a quarter of a century. The result is a strange, poetic, poignant study of a life half lived, and of suffering stubbornly endured.

We first meet Murphy’s Alice when she is 25 and communing with her alter ego in a dusty attic. On the surface she has much to be grateful for: three young children and a solid, budgie-breeding, banker husband. But her incessant tippling and thoughts of suicide tell us she is deeply disturbed. And when she reveals that there’s a strange, savage, beautiful and mysterious country inside me, she sounds like Ibsen’s Nora trapped inside the cage of bourgeois respectability.

But the virtue of Murphy’s play is that it implies some malaise in Irish society not confined to women. In the second, most striking episode, Alice, now 40, meets up with her former lover. Like Alice, he is outwardly successful: in fact, a famous TV face. But, mistaking the rendezvous for a signal to escape, he reveals his own seething violence and paranoia. As played by Juliet Stevenson and Stanley Townsend, this scene beautifully brings out both the wan despair of middle-age and some baffled affliction within the Irish temper.

By the third scene, Alice is a 50-year-old woman sitting in an airport restaurant communing with herself while her indecently-rich husband silently eats. If I find this scene the least engrossing, it is because her sadness is now externally motivated: she is estranged from her grown-up children, one of whom has prematurely died. Even so, there is something about her commitment to a habit-shrouded marriage that leaves one moved.

The play’s impact depends on Stevenson’s mesmerising performance. Although the character’s Irish roots are only fitfully suggested, she graphically shows how the incarcerated dreamer of 25 turns into the stoic sufferer of 50. What Stevenson also brings out is the character’s inner discontent: talking of the comfort offered by a priest in bereavement, she snaps out the word with metallic harshness. When she says there is no explanation for what cannot be explained, she might be talking of Murphy’s play. Although its final meaning is elusive, in Ian Rickson’s expertly judged production it admits us to the solitude and despair within the Irish soul.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 17 November 2005

Juliet Stevenson is never off-stage or out of the central spotlight of Tom Murphy’s new play in which we meet her at three very different moments in her life.

Through the looking-glass of her innermost thoughts, Alice emerges in Stevenson’s performance as a rather more chilly figure than we might have expected, given the turbulence of what is going on around her and in her soul.

Murphy writes with occasional echoes of both Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, resulting in a kind of bleak menace which lies oddly with some of the passion here.

The first time we meet Alice is in the attic; she is a mother of three already in a mid-life crisis and talking to her own alter ego, who may be her guardian angel or a chronicle of her death foretold.

From 1980 we go to 1995 down by the gasworks, where Alice has summoned her first love, now a successful Irish TV presenter, to talk over lost times.

If Murphy wants us to know anything about Alice, it is that she is slowly losing her grip, trapped by a joyless marriage and the kids, unable to lead the life she first had in mind.

The last part of the trilogy is even more bleak: We have arrived at 2005, and an airport where Alice has gone to bring home the body of her son killed in an accident, only to hear of a still more shocking death. Ian Rickson’s production is wonderfully spare, so that Stanley Townsend doubles the old flame in the second play with an especially nauseating waiter in the third. Derbhle Crotty does an equally impressive double of the waitress in the last play with the alter ego in the first.

But this is still really Stevenson’s evening.

Ruth Leon, DAILY EXPRESS, 17 November 2005

Tales of (another) desperate housewife

The Court’s outgoing artistic director, Ian Rickson, hasn’t personally staged quite as many plays here as one might have wished.On top form, he is a brilliantly sensitive and haunting director, and the good news is his touch remains utterly assured in his first premiere in the main house since April last year. Penned by Ireland’s revered playwright Tom Murphy, this is strange and sad triptych showing glimpses of a well-to-do but despairing, disturbed housewife. In 1980, we see Juliet Stevenson’s skinny, edgy Alice slipping into her attic, leaving the radio burbling downstairs, distantly audible along with screeches from her dull husband Bill’s bird cages. Stevenson is talking to herself, slumping in an old armchair and sliding a whiskey bottle from behind the cushion.

Then, out of the darkness, steps a pale, moon-faced, second woman (Derbhle Crotty) who starts to question Alice. She’s like a weird conflation of a quiz-show host and a risque imaginary friend, a comforting shrink and malign inner voice who asks if she would kill herself or ever do anything crazy regarding her children.

In 1995, we see Stevenson cutting across a shadowy, high-walled lane, suddenly greeted by an old flame, Stanley Townsend smiling yet menacingly fixated Jimmy. He is now a TV star, but deeply unhappy too.

Alice has, apparently, written to him seeking a reunion, unless this is all her (or his) imagination. Finally, in 2005, she and Bill (John Stahl) are stuck at an airport, as if in some ghostly white, godforsaken limbo, waiting to collect their son’s corpse.She barely hears her spouse’s attempts at conversation, wrapped in her own internal monologue.

Rickson’s production is spare, eerie and gripping. A potential suburban Medea, Stevenson has a frightening feral rage, and Tom Murphy law’s of increasing hopelessness has bleak potency. However this play, which is too obviously indebted to Beckett’s Not I, can be poetically laboured, and has a somewhat forced glint of hope at the end.

Kate Bassett, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 20 November 2005

With no special personal beauty, and nothing heroic about her acting manner, Juliet Stevenson is among today’s most absorbing actors.You can sit, noting her physical imperfections, and find you are locked inside her nervous system.

Much of her spell lies in her voice: it ideally marries intimacy to intensity, carries you softly along on its current and conceals her wonderful grasp of rhythm and phrasing. She gives you only a sketch of surface characterisation, and instead attends to deeper layers of the psyche.

Tom Murphy’s new Alice Trilogy has obvious defects but in its final third it rises to her level. Alice is an Irish married woman, seen in 1980, 1995 and finally 2005, always in a state of unhappiness.

The self-absorbed Alice is on the point of a breakdown in 1980; in the 1995 she is uselessly recalling the past with a former lover; in 2005 she is numbly going over her feelings at the worst moment in her life. In the first two, Murphy’s writing is both precious and thin, but in the third it reaches a stream of consciousness somewhere between Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) and Samuel Beckett (Happy Days).The worst has happened, yet Alice is not tragic.The grim irony of act three is that, though the worst has happened (her beloved son has died), it is bearable. She is ironic; she now speaks of herself in the third person.

Ian Rickson, directing, treats Murphy’s play classically.There is an obvious fault in Stevenson’s performance her Irish accent comes and goes and there are perhaps three high-tension points where she exaggerates. But she reveals pulse, metre, flow in the phrases of Murphy’s writing, realises its full potential as psychodrama and, amazingly, makes it spontaneous.Though Alice is the oddest heroine on the London stage, Stevenson not only makes her real: she makes you part of her.

Alastair Macaulay, FINANCIAL TIMES****, 18 November 2005

Alice (Juliet Stevenson) is married with three beautiful children.She also a pill-popping alcoholic when we first meet her, midway through an animated dialogue with someone who appears to be her counsellor but who, it emerges, is her alter ego. With mordent humour, she mocks the cliche of the desperate housewife and contemplates suicide.

When we next find her, 15 years later, she meeting an old flame, a successful actor who reveals with unexpected savagery that he, too, has a lifetime of concealed disillusion. Finally, some years on, Alice and her husband are eating dinner, waiting for a flight to take them home with the body of their dead son. He chews silently for half-an-hour; she numbly talks to herself, enduring what appears to be an existential crisis.

Tom Murphy’s new play uses a Beckettian stream of consciousness to investigate the gaping chasm between real and internalised worlds. Alice’s monologues reflect the displacement she feels as a mother and wife. But in Stevenson’s brilliant performance, they also highlight how she has internalised this displacement as a way to cope.

Murphy beautifully explores the gaps in communication and the way we lock things up inside in boredom and in grief. Nonetheless, alienation can be alienating to watch and the absence of external coordinates makes it difficult to connect with Alice. Ian Rickson directs with precision but it’s telling that the most moving moment is when Alice embraces a waitress, also stricken in grief, where nothing is said at all.

Claire Allfree, METRO, Monday 12 November 2005

Alice Trilogy4 stars Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark is one of the scariest plays I’ve ever seen. Alice Trilogy is chilling in a different way in that its steeped in a sense of isolation, which both Murphy’s writing and Ian Rickson’s sensitive production pinpoint with a painful accuracy. We drop in on Alice’s life in the 80s, 90s, and 2005. At first, Juliet Stevenson is seen as a young woman hiding in the attic, slugging back a bottle of whiskey before collecting her children from school, and complaining to her alter ego about her boring banker husband who she observes with a cruel objectivity. In the 90s she takes the unusually pro-active step of writing to an old flame. In spite of a glittering career, he turns out to be as discontented as herself.

Like another woman currently to be seen upstairs at this theatre, Alice becomes embittered and trapped in her own unhappiness. In the last scene, we listen in on her thoughts as she wonders at her ability to carry on in the face of the death of her son, and is unable to talk to her husband who sits chomping on fish and chips in the airport cafe as they wait for the coffin to be unloaded. She finally has something concrete to complain about but accepts her loss with a grim fatalism until, in an astonishing conclusion, she’s jolted into recognition of our shared humanity. This isn’t a fun night – Alice can be intolerable – but Stevenson brings a powerful intuition to the role and Murphy’s play finally acquires a bleak, Beckettian power.

Jane Edwardes, TIME OUT, Wednesday 23 November

The epic era of Irish theatre is over. The big cultural and social conflicts that buttressed the dramatic architecture of the generation of playwrights that emerged in the late 1950s are now resolved or in abeyance. What remains is a fragmentary, evocative, angular approach in which grand narratives and tragic clashes are replaced by more personal and — in a literal sense — eccentric visions. What is truly remarkable, however, is that the great figures of the passing era, Brian Friel and Tom Murphy, have chosen, almost half a century after they began to write, not to mourn what is gone but to explore the new territory with undiminished courage. Murphy new play — his first London premiere since 1961 — is a nerveless expedition into new stylistic territory.

The decision to unveil the play in London marks a breach with the Murphy canon. Were it not for the characteristic soundscape of Murphy’s dialogue, with its unmistakable fusion of the staccato and the baroque, it would be hard for anyone familiar with his work to identify it as one of his plays. Everything else is not just uncharacteristic but utterly different.

Murphy’s classic plays are intensive and unified, typically unfolding over a short time span on a single set. Alice Trilogy is divided and extensive: it captures its heroine in three different places over the last 25 years. The protagonists of the old plays search for transformation; Alice stays pretty much the same. Those plays were plugged into both Irish social conflicts and to a larger narrative superstructure, drawn from Greek tragedy, fairytale, folklore, religion or myth. Alice’s story does have some sense of an Ireland reaching material prosperity, but it does not seem to have a shaping myth.

These are huge changes, and admirers of The Gigli Concert or Bailegangaire will probably experience them as losses. There is a downward shift in scale, for while Alice Trilogy actually has a larger cast than either of those plays, it feels much smaller. This is partly because of its episodic structure, but largely because it happens essentially in the mind of its protagonist, who describes herself in a moment of self-contempt as a (quote) tupid housewife(unquote) with three children, married to a rising bank official in an unnamed Irish town.

Even while noting the losses, however, it is impossible not to admire the courage. No one could ever have called Tom Murphy a minimalist before, yet he claims the term here. It is not just that there are echoes of Beckett in Alice internal monologues, but that Murphy has sloughed off so much of what has made him great and looked around to see what is left to build on. He brings just two things to the newly-levelled ground: language and acting. And he brings them together.

Alice Trilogy is much more a score than a text. This has always been true of Murphy dialogue, but it is far more radically so here. Most of what Juliet Stevenson’s Alice says is not for the purpose of communication. It is spoken to herself. In the first act, she sits drinking whiskey before she sets out to collect her kids from school, talking to an interlocutor (Derbhle Crotty, who is very good here and stunning in the last act when she has almost nothing to say) who clearly does not exist outside of her own head. In the second, she meets up with her first boyfriend, now a famous TV presenter (a supple concoction of charm and menace by Stanley Townsend), but this, too may all be in her mind, and in any case they address images of each other rather than real presences. And in the third act, Alice waits at an airport with her husband for the body of their dead son, but they occupy separate dramatic spaces: he sits and eats while she talks aloud, mostly to herself and us.

Her speech in this last section is almost like a set of spoken stage directions in which she describes herself and her situation largely in the third person. Writing and acting are completely fused, pointing to Murphy’s search for an almost pure theatre in which the play becomes entirely about the performance. Juliet Stevenson has the guts and the genius to rise to this challenge. The wandering of her accent between Dublin and the North of England does hinder the flow of the language and the pacing of Ian Rickson’s otherwise flawless production sometimes swallows the bitter comedy of Murphy’s writing. But Stevenson is still a marvel of heightened alertness and quicksilver mobility. Her face, eyes, hands, voice and attitude are in such wonderful flux that her performance achieves a weightlessness that perfectly matches the bold gesture with which Murphy shrugs off the expectations generated by his past achievements.

Fintan O’Toole, IRISH TIMES, 21 November 2005