Piano/Forte ( Archived )

Reviews

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Michael Billington, The Guardian, 21 September

Terry Johnson’s last play was an affectionate tribute to Hitchcock. His latest is more reminiscent of a 1940s Gainsborough Studios melodrama. But, although it is undeniably overheated, I infinitely prefer Johnson’s wild

excess to other dramatists’ buttoned-up restraint.

Even the setting is spooky: an oak-panelled, starling-haunted mansion belonging to a disgraced Tory MP about to embark on a third marriage to a glamour model. But Johnson’s main focus is on the two daughters. Abigail is a shy, piano-playing agoraphobe. Louise is a febrile neurotic who returns home apparently to liberate her sister, disrupt their father’s wedding and seek revenge for their mother’s suicide.

So what is Johnson up to? At first I thought his play was an attack on a culture in which political disgrace is turned into personal aggrandisement. But eventually, like David Hare’s The Secret Rapture, it becomes a study of the clamorous demands of the disordered. Starting out as a louche eccentric who greets her father’s future bride in bare-breasted splendour, Louise increasingly turns into a maniacal destroyer. You assume, initially, her father is responsible for her instability; but Johnson goes on to imply that real suffering is not a social weapon and Louise’s trauma is touched with narcissism.

In the end, Johnson throws almost too much into the pot: good and evil, sanity and madness, the opportunism of a celebrity culture. But his production is rich in theatrical invention, including the eruption of a pair of anarchic Spanish acrobats, and beautifully played. Kelly Reilly is stunning as Louise, suggesting the character’s mix of erotic wildness, determined self-preoccupation and deep loneliness. Alicia Witt is equally impressive as Abigail, implying an interior life through her silence, and playing Ravel and Chopin with formidable skill. Oliver Cotton even makes a case for the culpable patriarch and Natalie Walter shows that his supposedly dumb bride possesses a fundamental decency. It may be a play full of cinematic echoes, but in its fascination with sex and death it is pure Terry Johnson.

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Michael Coveney, Whatsonstage, 21 September

Paying customers should be warned that Terry Johnson’s new play contains scenes of nudity. And of madness, music, mayhem and maternal memories; not to mention flying Spanish waiters, sibling stand-offs and set-tos, flocks of starlings and a live piano recital of music by Ravel, Rachmaninov and Chopin.

The very least you can say of it, therefore, is that it makes a change from your average run-of-the-mill Royal Court play. Johnson has always been marvellous one-off, but he is a considerable craftsman, too, and this new dramatic fandango is as strange and compelling as anything he has written to date. It is also highly entertaining.

Two sisters, Abigail and Louise, await the arrival of their father, a disgraced Tory MP, and his new fiance, a blonde glamour model. Their mother (the MPs first wife; the model will be his third) committed suicide. Abigail, a withdrawn agoraphobic, is tied to the household. Wild child Louise has run away from the circus. She beats down the door claiming shes been raped then smashes a family portrait over the baronial banister of Dad’s Gothic mansion in the Home Counties.

Just as David Hare wrote the misleadingly titled Breath of Life (the one quality that play lacked) for Judi Dench and Maggie Smith, so Johnson, far more successfully, has tailored a stage suit for the talented, red-headed and convincingly sororal duet of Alicia Witt (a superb pianist) and Kelly Reilly, the one placid and deeply troubled inside (piano), the other demonstrative, neurotically brutal and emotionally florid (forte); Reilly’s Louise – a stunning, award-winning performance if ever I saw one – totes a gun, topless, mocking the new fiancee’s profession in an aggressive display of the most beautiful breasts seen on the Courts stage since Harriet Walters in a Timberlake Wertenbaker play many years ago.

Oliver Cotton’s neatly inflected Clifford, the MP, has found a new life in celebrity, and work as a restaurant critic, and conveys all the supercilious immorality that familiar transition implies. Dawn, the model, beautifully and touchingly done by Natalie Walter, doesn’t want the Wedding March for the big day; she wants that Robin Hood thing which turns out, with splendid bathos, to be Coming through the Glen. This is where Louises old circus chums from Barcelona, the Spanish waiters (Nuria Benet and Sebastian Gonzalez) bring the first act to a riotous conclusion in an aerial pantomime featuring a very large, and shall we say practical, dildo.

Johnson’s shorter second act subsides into the Sam Shepard-like format of memory and recrimination implied at the start, where Danny Webbs shifty Australian uncle, Ray, delivers a tantalising short prologue about the flocks of starlings and a couple of gunshots. There are revelations of incest, and a second, more sinister, chaotic climax that leaves Abigail alone once more, playing Ravels Pavanne for a Dead Child. Destruction and liberation are the twin polarities of the play, and mothers locked piano is alive once more and the starlings have returned.

Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 21 September

There are some plays that make you sigh with Pooterish relief and say: ‘Thank God I am staid and bourgeois with happy children, a wife I love and a home free of all that jagged misery.’

Terry Johnsons luxuriantly written new work is taut with glamorous, elite aggression.

The twentysomething rebel daughter of a disgraced Tory MP trouble in a short skirt returns to her grand country home to taunt her agoraphobic sister and wreck Daddys third marriage.

Playwright Johnson plainly thinks Tory MPs are still the height of infamy. Happily, he soon drops the political angle for wider slashes against our eras dank humanity.

His central character, this drug-munching, self-analysing, libidinous trustafarian called Louise, is an essay in selfishness. Kelly Reilly catches her supremely, from her snorting bravado to her contemptuous abrasive sexuality.

The fathers new blonde is an ex-Page Three model dim, decent, out of her depth. Wild child Louise greets her new stepmother by prancing bare-bosomed down the houses oak staircase and proceeds to behave in a thoroughly vile manner.

Its as though someone had wired up Noel Cowards Hay Fever to the Osbournes. Louise blames her father (Oliver Cotton, looking not unlike David Owen) for the suicide of her mother two decades earlier. But is that really what makes her such an unspeakably, unfeasibly horrible daughter?

Or is Louise just the classic dramatic intruder who destroys all that existed before? En route she sends her mentally unstable sister Abigail (excellent, stuttering Alicia Witt) even further round the bend.

I must not make this play sound too unremittingly grim. It is often very funny. It has some tumultuous piano. There are also moments of Almodovar-standard lewdness.

At one point a bare-bummed trapeze artist with a strap on phallus flies through the air. Miss Reillys boobs, for the record, are a vision of Olympian splendour.

No doubt all the violence and pornography and swearing (lots) and vicious mind games are a metaphor for the decadence of our disgusting age.

But you do still come out of this exhaustingly unhappy show thinking: ‘Thank God Im not quite that bad.’