Blood ( Archived )

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Review

Pictured (L to R): Nicholas Le Prevost, Francesca Annis & Tom Hardy.

Photography by Ivan Kyncl

Pity the poor critic! The more one describes of this compelling 1995 play by the Swedish dramatist Lars Noren, the more one subverts its narrative tension; yet it is virtually impossible to discuss its central idea without revealing something of its story.

It starts with a Parisian TV interview with Rosa Sabato: a journalist deported from her native Chile in 1974. Gradually we learn that Rosa was an Allende-supporting activist who, along with her psychologist husband, was separated from their eight-year-old son, who joined the ranks of the disappeared.

Now Rosa has written an autobiographical novel in an attempt to exorcise her trauma. But while Rosa is being interviewed we watch her husband, Eric, listening to answering machine messages from an ex-patient, Luca, who is clearly his lover.

At this point, it appears that Noren is dealing with familiar themes: the pain of exile, the weight of the past, the contrast between the high-bourgeois life and the reality of torture and oppression. But, as the play progresses and we see Luca’s life impinging on the Sabato dessicated existence, we begin to realise that Noren is raising an even bigger issue: the question of whether primal tragic patterns recur down the generations and whether, in the age of Kosovo, the Middle East conflict and African wars, the mask of civilisation is breaking down.

While I find Noren’s play exquisitely gripping, there is a central flaw in its thinking. Noren implies that, on both the familial and political level, we are doomed to re-enact the past. But while Greek tragedy rests on the assumption that the laws of the universe are just, we are more aware of living in a world governed by anarchy, accident and confusion.

Even though I question Noren’s thesis, there is something aesthetically satisfying about his relentless pursuit of a tragic pattern. James Macdonald’s production and Hildegard Bechtler’s equally immaculate design also remind us that the play is rooted in exact social observation. The opening TV-interview, carefully sidestepping American involvement in Allende overthrow, has just the right apolitical portentousness. The marital exchanges between Rosa and Eric also possess, in Maja Zade translation, a classic Pinterish evasiveness.

Francesca Annis lends Rosa a fine harrowed anguish, Nicholas Le Prevost is all guilt-ridden civility as her husband and Tom Hardy endows the demanding Luca with an intemperate rage. For two hours one is held in the serpentine intricacy of Noren narrative. Only after the play is over do you begin to question whether you can apply the unyielding laws of Greek tragedy to the bewildering chaos of contemporary life.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 26 September 2003

In 1974, political activists Rosa and Eric Sabato were deported from Chile after months of imprisonment, torture and the isappearanceof their eight-year-old son.

Now resident in Paris, Eric works as a therapist specialising in helping people with Aids, while Rosa, a war journalist, has just written a novel focusing on their loss.

Day to day, Rosa desires sadomasochistic sex from her husband as a way of remaining connected with reality; he meanwhile has embarked on a homosexual affair with one of his considerably younger patients.

How people live with trauma, be it political upheaval, near intolerable grief or the wider social history of civil war, is at the centre of this emotionally intelligent play. It asks harrowing questions about the subliminal impact of such devastation on personal behaviour.

Some may question the central plot twist as overly schematic, (that it is obvious, is, I think, partly the point) but it serves as a symbolic force as much as anything. People can anatomise trauma as a means of controlling it, but there are some things that will always be beyond our intelligence.

James Macdonald’s production lends the play impressive dignity, framing scenes with soothing music and calm lighting, while Francesca Annis is brilliant as Rosa, finding both her ruin and her capacity for endurance.

You cannot miss the disturbing, erotic frisson when Francesca Annis, with the airs and enigmatic grace of a Harold Pinter femme fatale, arrives at the apartment of Luca, a temperamental medical student she has recently met. Having barely exchanged a few, correct pleasantries, Miss Annis’s Rosa, a married, Chilean war correspondent living in Paris, is half-undressed and in the arms and bed of a man scarcely more than half her age and young enough to be her son. Fearful dramatic ironies are at hand. For by this point the audience knows far more about the intimate links between Rosa, her psychoanalyst husband Eric and Luca than these three characters do themselves.

Blood, by the prolific Swedish dramatist Lars Noren, is flawed by suspect psychology and flights of deathly melodrama that ridiculously require us to believe that a therapist would not see what is staring him in his consulting room. Yet despite the play defects, an over-emphasised debt to Oedipus Rex and its farcical heir, Joe Orton Entertaining Mr Sloane, I was absolutely mesmerised by Blood until the implausible finale. Taboos are freshly broken on the English stage and scenes of incestuous contact between generations first gay then briefly heterosexual, carry a distressing, emotional charge and uneasy conviction. It would, though, be unfair to give more of Blood shocking family secrets away.

Noren’s play looks back to the 1970s, revealing how the Chilean military Junta have ruined a Jewish, middle-class Left-wing couple, whom they tortured and imprisoned. Their young son also disappeared, never to be seen again. Twenty years on, prosperous in Paris, Rosa and Eric are still possessed by their sense of loss. At first, Blood moves at too leisurely a pace, Miss Annis’s Rosa, handsomely aloof, gives an over-length television interview about her autobiographical book on surviving Pinochet. Nicholas Le Prevost as her dessicated, introverted husband watches at home, understandably not that interested .

The mood swiftly changes. In a scene of muted alienation, the gulf between the analyst and his neglected wife looms apparent. Eric’s secret love affair with Luca and Rosa’s masochistic rituals in which Eric is complicit are chillingly evoked by director James Macdonald in cinematic flashes of light and black-out. Superlative Tom Hardy invests Luca with raw energy and suppressed desperation while Miss Annis is quite wonderful as Rosa, whose tense, watchful composure yields to mute, wide-eyed horror. Macdonald understated production, although hampered by clumsy scene changes, makes Blood rush with its family hometruths and political animus.

Nicholas de Jongh, EVENING STANDARD, 26 September 2003.