Aunt Dan and Lemon

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Date	Time	Venue	Notes	Prices	Booking Link
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Dates in May
Wed 20 May 2009	7:30pm		Jerwood Theatre Downstairs
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Reviews

4 stars The Independent, 01 June 2009

There’s a stunning moment in this extraordinary 1985 play by Wallace Shawn  revived on the stage where it was first seen  when Jane Horrocks, addressing us like the lady on Listen with Mother (“Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin”) declares that she’s given up reading detective novels to read about Nazis killing the Jews instead.
Shawn is a master of putting the unspeakable into the mouths of plausible but slightly warped characters, and sad little Lemon starts by commending the Nazis for achieving much of what they wanted to do and ends by excoriating a deep-rooted hypocrisy in the cult of compassion.

The villainous hero of the piece is Henry Kissinger, no less, whom Lemon’s mentor, the curious Aunt Dan, an Oxford academic friend of her Anglophile American father and soft liberal mother, sanctifies as someone who does our dirty work for us by killing peasants in Vietnam. As a beneficiary of a nasty foreign policy, you have no right, says Dan, to complain about the brokers of your own wellbeing and security.

Shawn insists on making links between our creature comforts, the exploitation of others and the end of the civilised world, and the ambition is not always easy to grasp in the theatre; but this play acts as a catalyst between private instinct and public evidence of spiritual malfunction. 

The play is a brilliant convocation of monologue, party sketches, nostalgic remembrance and a poignant friendship. Aunt Dan must surely be based on one of Shawn’s New Yorker editor dad’s eccentric contributors.

This is a compelling, sensitively poetic production, the 12-strong cast admirably led by Horrocks on scintillating, wickedly confidential form, and Lorraine Ashbourne slinky and disarming, if not quite intellectually convincing, as Aunt Dan. Lemon, as Fintan O’Toole correctly observed, is Shawn’s Iago, a creature of strangely dislikeable opinions whom we love to get to know in the theatre. A great evening’.

British Theatre Guide

Aunt Dan and Lemon takes a sharp look at this writer’s favourite subjects – politics, sex and sexual politics – through the eyes of sickly, wide-eyed Lemon (Jane Horrocks). This invalid has spent so much of her life ill that she is forced to live vicariously through the one person who showed a real interest in her development.
 
From the perspective of maturity, she looks back in anger and approbation at the life of someone who is both mentor and idol, her parents’ American friend Danielle, or Aunt Dan. Lorraine Ashbourne makes the older woman passionate beyond belief, sometimes terrifyingly so, and, by the end, one realises that her irrepressible spirit has transferred to Lemon.
 
To say that Aunt Dan’s views and lifestyle are eccentric and extreme is understating the case. She rides neo-con hobby horses as if they were chargers, reducing Lemon’s poor mother (played by Mary Roscoe) to stunned silence and even tears of frustration.
 
Dan’s main enthusiasm is for Henry Kissinger and his willingness to order the murder of North Korean civilians in the cause of his own country. This has disturbing parallels with the activities of the recent administration of George W. Bush in Iraq, making a play first performed almost 25 years ago in this same building, with Shawn himself playing triple roles, feel absolutely relevant to an audience today.
 
Her young acolyte was enthralled, not only by the storming speeches but the salacious tales of New York living in the Swinging Sixties (or Fifties?). Her friends are petty gangsters and upmarket call girls, which makes for some colourful storytelling.
 
This builds to a final tale featuring Scarlett Johnson as Mindy, a pretty Englishwoman whose desire for cash is so highly developed that she will stop at nothing in its pursuit.
 
Her story falls into place beside the common view of Aunt Dan and the pro-Nazi Lemon regarding the kind of unnatural selection that society needs in order to thrive.
 
This tightly plotted and directed (by Dominic Cooke) play mixes comedy with some serious philosophical propositions and grips throughout. It is graced by memorable performances in very different modes from Jane Horrocks playing gauche but determined and Lorraine Ashbourne, single-minded and devil-may-care’.
 

thelondonpaper, 28th May 2009

Brutal and uncompromising, this play doesnt offer easy answers, but it makes us question the sinister influences of decadence, war and family’.
 

The Financial Times, 24/05/09

Domonic Cooke directs this troubling play which explores the fascination that brutality and violence hold for some people’.

  3 stars The Guardian, 28th May 2009

The Royal Court’s assault on the liberal conscience continues with this revival of Wallace Shawn’s 1985 play. It is certainly an eerie experience, and is excellently directed’.
 
‘Jane Horrocks’ Lemon has exactly the right blend of infantile wonderment and crabbed, late-20s solitude’.
  4 stars Whatsonstage.com, 28th May 2009

The Wallace Shawn season at the Royal Court has been a triumph. Dominic Cookes programme is further vindicated by his own revival of a play – starring Jane Horrocks and Lorraine Ashbourne, both superb.
 
Whats great about Shawn is that he can propose these ideas in the voice of a character you may dislike, yet he touches on a nerve in the liberal conscience without sounding loud or stupid; hes a stylistic master of dramatic casuistry. The central passages of the two-hour play  mostly comprising long monologues  concern Henry Kissinger, the US Defence Secretary during the Vietnam War, and Aunt Dans interest in him. 
 
Horrocks is perfect in this role, combining a confidential bedside manner with childish innocence, and shes technically brilliant, while Ashbournes Dan is far fruitier and more sensual than Linda Hunts sinister little freak in the original. Good cameos, too, from Paul Chahidi as Lemons brutishly Anglophile father, Mary Roscoe as her liberally incoherent mother and Scarlett Johnson as a sexy, vengeful lesbian’.

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