Forty Winks

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Reviews

From L to R: Carey Mulligan, Dominic Rowan and Anastasia Hille.

All good dramatists stake out their own terrain. And in the case of Kevin Elyot it is a desolate emotional landscape filled with guilt, loss and unrequited passion.

As in his last play, Mouth to Mouth, Elyot shows us the devastating impact of a rootless outsider on a bourgeois family. In this case the hero, Don, is a cosmopolitan drifter who has never got over his schoolboy love for the beautiful Diana.

And in four ingeniously structured scenes we watch the quixotic Don invading the married Diana’s fractious Hampstead home. All one can safely reveal is that none of the characters including Dian boorish husband, gay brother-in-law and narcoleptic daughter remain untouched by his presence.

If there is a crucial clue as to what Elyot is up to, it lies in Don and Diana’s vividly remembered youthful visit to a Pasolini film called Theorem.

In that 1968 movie Terence Stamp played a quasi-divine visitor who created erotic havoc inside a wealthy industrialist family, leaving them unable to cope with the resulting chaos. But, while Elyot adopts Pasolini’s plot structure, he lacks his mentor’s moral standpoint. Where Pasolini’s movie offered a Marxist critique of a commodified bourgeois life, Elyot seems more like a detached observer.

What he does understand is the nature of obsession; and the best moments in the play stem from Don dangerous fixation.

As played by Dominic Rowan, he seems like a man arrested in time at the moment where he fell in love with Diana: the danger lies in his transference of that love to her daughter.

And the most haunting episode in Katie Mitchell’s production comes when Don, left alone with the sleeping adolescent, finds his gaze inexorably drawn to her as the sound of Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture floats through the summer air.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 4 November 2004

His obsessive subject matter is undoubtedly potent, concerning the damage that time inflicts on human lives, the power of memory, and the sudden blazing epiphanies of love, sex, happiness or the despair that can colour the rest of our existence. He is the most Proustian of dramatists, as well as a gay writer with an unusual understanding of and empathy for, heterosexuals.

Like all his dramas, Forty Winks plays tricks with time. We begin with a funeral, then go back to a marriage which seems to have caused unhappiness all round. We also watch the persistence of love turning perverse, as Don, one of those marginal drifters who are such a feature of Elyot plays, attempts to recapture the first careless rapture of his love for Diana, the schoolgirl with whom he fell in love with in his teens.

Reviewing Elyot’s plays is always a nightmare, because his clever time schemes and narrative twists lose so much of their impact if you give them away. Suffice to say that this play concerns the reunion of a group of thirtysomethings who were at school together 14 years earlier, and that old passions and resentments are dangerously rekindled before the action moves forward another 16 years for a desolate and creepy last scene.

Katie Mitchell directs a beautifully acted, tensely absorbing production that crackles with social unease and dangerous desire, though the scene changes of Hildegard Bechtler’s unnecessarily monumental designs badly interrupt the flow of the piece.

Dominic Rowan remains deeply sympathetic, despite his wayward appetites, as the love-haunted, insomniac Don, while Anastasia Hille is at her intense, emotionally raw best as the now haggard woman he loved in her teens. The moment when he uses her childhood nickname, and her face crumples with an ache of remembered happiness, is heart-stoppingly beautiful.

There’s strong support from Simon Wilson as the school boy bully she ended up marrying; Paul Ready as his gay, vulnerable younger brother, who always held a torch for Don; Stephen Kennedy as a hilariously fat and unhealthy cardiologist; and Carey Mulligan as Diana’s sleepy teenage daughter.

Charles Spencer,THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 4 November 2004

Premiered now in Katie Mitchell’s beautifully cast production at the Royal Court, his haunting new 70 minute play , Forty Winks gives these preoccupations and tics of technique a fresh airing. In Forty Winks, the might-have-been relationship on which the protagonist Don has become permanently stuck is heterosexual and has left him constantly on the move around the world. The past is revived much more disturbingly in Forty Winks. What could pose more of a risk than a teenage girl who is the image of her mother in youth and who just happens (hence the title) to suffer from narcolepsy, repeatedly slumping in temptation-stirring bouts of sleep?

The excelllent Dominic Rowan arouses exactly the right degree of troubled sympathy for Don’s complex agitation. Forty Winks pitches in at a point near the end of the drama. Don has just given a funeral oration and Anastasia Hille Diana, the married longer-for love of his life and the sister of the deceased, pays him a surprise visit at his hotel. She seizes him in a sexual embrace, but he can respond (for more reasons than one) because of the strange noises coming from the bathroom. The play then leaves this hot, tense, sweaty episode dangling and hops back to a Sunday lunchtime, a few weeks before, when Don had re-entered the lives of these old friends after 14 years.

A reviewer’s hands are tied. To pay proper tribute to the eerie way the play leaves certain crucial things eternally suspended in mystery would involve exposing too much of the intricate (and occasionally hard-to-credit) plot. I found the experience a potent one, even while feeling that the distribution of the sleep-theme was rather strained and that the jokes (courtesy of the gay characters) were thinner on the ground than formerly.

Located in just one setting, some of the playwright’s earlier works have made the temporal transitions with a dreamily deceptive seamlessness. Here, an ominous black wall thuds down like a guillotine to allow the shift in time and place. It would be both presumptuous and inaccurate to argue that, given his abiding concerns, Elyot must be as arrested as his protagonists. He has what they lack: a renewing creative freedom.

Kevin Elyot is obsessed with obsessive love, and his fascination is catching. This playwright (of My Night with Reg fame) depicts doomed yet persistent passions with an intensity that all the more riveting for being constrained and entwined with humour. Thus, contrary to the title, it hard to take your eyes off his new play, Forty Winks, directed by Katie Mitchell.

You never quite know if you are watching a crime thriller here, and the opening scene toys with that sinister possibility as we find ourselves in a hotel bedroom. It looks blandly serene: pale green wallpaper; grey evening light filtering through the net curtain. But Dominic Rowan’s thirtysomething Don has just answered the door and his back is drenched in sweat. Anastasia Hille’s Diana, quivering on the threshold, clearly wants to be asked in and is making panting, nervous small talk. It becomes clear that they’ve just attended a funeral and have had some past intimacy. He struggles to resist her advances, hastily explains away a thud from the bathroom, and seems petrified by her sudden ardent kiss.

A giant steel shutter snaps down on this scene and when it opens again we are in flashback. After 14 years odd years abroad, Don has impulsively turned up at Diana house. Mourning his mother death, he wanders into his ex-girlfriend garden as she and her gay brother, Charlie and her husband, Howard, are sitting around the remains of an alfresco lunch. As the table is cleared and everybody prepares to dash to a concert, Don is caught in a chain of tense tete a tetes about the unforgettably ardent love-triangles of their school days. He ends up staying behind at the house, watching over Diana’s 14 year old daughter, Hermia, who has developed narcolepsy possibly as a result of being assaulted on the heath a year before. Another 14 odd years later, we see a Don circling back again to Diana’s house.

This darkening drama is shot through with delightful shafts of comic relief. Hille and Rowan are treading a superbly fine line between awkwardness and searing grief, and Paul Ready is also excellent as the chattering, needy Charlie.

However, it must be said that the play is flawed. Charlie’s talk about writing a play sounds self-consciously contrived on the part of the dramatist, the confessions of rekindled adoration feel slightly rushed, and the crime thriller plotline culminates in two melodramatic twists. Still, the performances never flag and Rowan and Hille’s moments of agonised desire are burnt into my memory.

Kate Bassett, INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, 7 November 2004

Kevin Elyot is a playwright who has made a brilliant career out of revisiting the same theme again and again: how to reclaim those lost but defining moments in life where everything changed, wondering: “If we could only step back

In Forty Winks, his latest, most mature and ultimately disturbing examination of illuminating this, these words are spoken by Diana to Don, the boy she once loved at school, when they are reunited for the first time in 14 years. This is not the only unfinished business in a sad, intimate and intricately-patterned play about love and loss. Katie Mitchell’s spare but emotionally charged production is played with a febrile tension throughout.

Mark Shenton, SUNDAY EXPRESS, 7 November 2004