The Fever

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Reviews

3 stars Michael Billington, The Guardian, Tuesday 7th April 2009

Heated assault on myth that the world is getting fairer

The first time I heard Wallace Shawn’s 90-minute monologue at the Edinburgh Traverse, I was bowled over by it: I was not used to sitting in theatres and encountering such a naked assault on our privileged existence. And even if I am now more aware of Shawn’s occasional prolixity, I still admire the piece’s moral force, here superbly articulated by Clare Higgins.
 
The speaker, who can be female or male as occasion demands, recalls a visit to a poor country. Gripped by a fever, she vomits ceaselessly. But the real fever lies in the capitalist system of which she is a part. Uprooted from her normal surroundings, she achieves a heightened awareness of the world’s grotesque inequalities.
 
Her wealth, she realises, depends on others’ poverty, her comfort on others’ deprivation. Even more crucially, she sees that her cosseted existence insulates her from a world of political murder and torture.
 
Shawn is not averse to repetition; and, writing as the son of a famous New Yorker editor, he sometimes assumes that we all share his own cultivated background. But the strength of Shawn’s piece, particularly in light of the current global crisis, is its ability to hit nails squarely on the head.
 
In particular, Shawn skewers the myth about a gradualist reform of the unequal distribution of the world’s resources. His writing also throws up odd, arresting images: he sums up prosperous, retired executives in a hotel ballroom as “men with baggy pants and big thighs and coins in their pockets”. And there is even a hint of Pinter’s shock tactics in the vision of a home bedside table where a human brain and a severed hand replace the familiar books and letters.
 
Given that the piece started out as a private performance, it adjusts well to the public stage and, under Dominic Cooke’s direction, is rendered with escalating power by Higgins. Clad in a white shirt and blue jeans, she starts in low-key conversational mode. But, as she warms to her theme, she assumes the speaker’s disenchantment with her own existence. By the end, you feel she has earned the right to declare that “the life I live is irredeemably corrupt”. But, in saying that, Higgins is echoing our own liberal guilt and willingness to accede to the world’s hypocrisies.
 
In the end, Shawn is reminding us of a basic truth: that no man is an island. And I am more than happy to put up with the odd longueur to receive such a salutary message.
 
 
  3 stars Benedict Nightingale, The Times, Tuesday 7th April 2009

One woman pleads guilty to world’s injustices

Have you passed by a sickly youth sitting on the pavement with a mangy dog and a hand held out, telling yourself that he’d only spend your money on drugs? Or used an unsolicited Red Cross pencil without making a donation? Or complained about the inflated fare demanded by a subcontinental taxi-driver who, you later learnt, had to pay the person who had hired him the cab before he made enough to feed his family? I have, and I too have been left with the feelings of guilt and resentment that Wallace Shawn clearly felt when he wrote this monologue in 1991- and Clare Higgins convinced me she also felt when she delivered it last night.
 
The Fever launches a Shawn season at the Royal Court, and fever is what seems to be overwhelming Higgins’s unnamed American as she crouches in an insect-infested hotel bathroom in an unspecified Third or Fourth-World country. Nor is she just reproaching herself for having withheld coins from a beggar. In her midnight mood she decides she’s basically so complicit in beggary, poverty, oppression, torture, state murder, everything that’s bad, that she and her equally well-to-do friends are “irredeemably corrupt”.
 
Shawn is the Ancient Mariner at the feast, the puritan in the posh pulpit, the angry flagellant who aims his whip at all the privileged, including himself. The protagonist of his Fever also comes across as a Manhattan Marxist, persistently asking how the haves can think of themselves as decent, sensitive people when their wealth is derived from historic injustice and still exists at the expense of the have-nots. And, yes, she admits it, shed hand the rebellious poor over to the executioners if they seriously threatened the way of life she’s always taken for granted.
 
The Fever is, I suppose, especially topical at a time when the richer nations and individuals are doing their damnedest to cling on to their prosperity. But is selfishness all around? Aren’t the G20 leaders, let alone the world’s charities, showing some responsibility for poor nations? And isn’t Shawns division between “rich” and “poor” too absolute? Arent many in-betweens struggling along without becoming moral cannibals? And is the idea of gradual economic improvement always the comforting lie that Shawn’s character claims? Just compare 19th-century Britain with Britain now.
 
Yet like his Aunt Dan and Lemon, which shows the forming of a fascist mentality, The Fever is that rare thing, genuinely challenging. Also, it’s performed with a fine blend of feeling and incisiveness by the always excellent Higgins. Yet to praise her on aesthetic grounds is to miss the play’s point. Those of us who spend our pounds on theatre, opera, music, art are, after all, among the world’s exploiters.
 
  4 stars Michael Coveney, What’s on stage, Tuesday 7th April 2009

The Fever

The American playwright Wallace Shawn doesn’t think theatre is worthwhile unless it makes you squirm at least a little bit, and The Fever, a disturbing monologue which he first played at the Royal Court himself (in the Upstairs studio in 1991) certainly gets under your skin.
 
Well, it got under my skin in Shawn’s performance and it certainly does again in Clare Higgins’ riveting account on the main stage. The one character is really a sort of disembodied voice of the author saying what he really thinks about being a pampered middle-class liberal holed up in a hotel in a small country with a war going on outside.
 
The traveller, in this case Higgins, describes an execution she knows is happening that morning. It’s as if she’s there. She then drifts in and out of memories and dreams, making connections between the poor and the privileged, re-defining the philosophy of Karl Marx, wondering why anyone should weep for a Chekhov character who is leaving a cherry orchard to live in a Paris apartment, recalling childhood slights and fears.
 
Higgins is simply dressed in a crisp white blouse and blue jeans. Director Dominic Cooke allows her a chair to sit on, a water cooler to drink from and a huge packing case to lean against. Otherwise the stage, lit by Jean Kalman in three distinct passages of time, is bare, scenery piled up to the side, back wall visible, a ladder leaning against it.
 
It’s not so much anti-theatre as naked theatre, a very different thing. Shawn first performed the piece in private Manhattan apartments to small audiences of friends. Higgins brings the full armoury of her acting technique to suggest something less quizzical: the tragedy of helplessness and the need for minor consolation at all times.
 
She rings various vocal variations, colouring the wonderfully supple prose with sudden bursts of anger and even oratorical flourish, especially in the chilling insistence that, should the poor take over, then they must do so with morality, not violence – or they’ll be shot.
 
The play somehow incorporates political hypocrisy into the stew as well, even as it reveals a mind perturbed by the impossibility of taking positive action that means anything while luxuriating in the pleasures of art and clean bed linen. It’s a brilliant play and a great start to the three-month Wallace Shawn season in Sloane Square.
 
 
  4 stars Michael Coveney, Independent, Wednesday 8 April 2009

The Fever

I don’t know what people who give generously to charities think about themselves, but here comes Wallace Shawn to suggest that you might be misguided to suppose
that adopting a caring attitude necessarily makes you a good citizen.
 
Not a nice thought, is it? But the brilliant thing about Shawn’s monologue for a pampered liberal traveller struck down by vomiting fits in a war-torn small country in, say, Latin America is that the judgmental element implicit in that first paragraph is completely absent in the play.
 
Shawn himself first delivered the monologue in private homes in his native Manhattan and then took it into theatres, including the Royal Court’s upstairs studio in 1991, lisping and kvetching in an armchair while blinking at the light like a liberated mole.
 
By contrast, Clare Higgins takes the stage with tremendous bravura, delivering the carefully wrought but never ostentatious prose with a sense of both helplessness and anger, making connections between creature comforts and slave labour and declaring that we, the audience, no less than she, the witness, could not exist without the poor doing awful work. We need them. Their poverty is precious to us.
 
One of Andrew Marr’s guests on Start the Week said that the play wasn’t really a play at all. Even if you were to concede that there is such a thing as “a play” by definition, the stark un-theatricality of The Fever is in effect the opposite, a point made by the highly visible unused scenery, the stark back wall, the piled-up chairs. Higgins, in white blouse and blue jeans, is both an abstract voice and a highly charged theatrical presence: it’s like Beckett with bottom and bellyache.
 
She drifts skilfully between oratorical modes of reflection, despair, anecdotal precision and a political righteousness fuelled by fear. The traveller’s consoling certainties in life are Beethoven, dancers flying into each other’s arms, clean linen, a bottle of wine; the questions for which, tragically, there are no answers, are to do with how we should live, how we should feel, what we should think. If the exercise is indeed one of self-indulgent liberal meditation, it’s one that is articulated with searing honesty and a dry, elegant wittiness. Maybe it’s OK to hate Comic Relief after all.

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