The Woman Before ( Archived )

Reviews

From L to R: Saskia Reeves, Helen Baxendale, Tom Riley, Nigel Lindsay.

Photography: Keith Pattison.

DARK BLAST FROM THE PAST

The Woman Before confirms Roland Schimmelpfennig’s status as a dramatist of provocative originality. This German playwright has fashioned a theatrical style all his own. His new play functions as a horrifying revenge drama, a study of female obsession, a black comedy of male faithlessness and a warning parable about the fragility of the marriage-bond. Strangeness strikes at once.

A woman called Romy, played by Helen Baxendale as if frostily detached from reality, knocks at an apartment door. She reminds Frank, who opens it, that 20 years earlier he promised to love her forever. Now, like Ibsen’s heroine in When We Dead Awaken, she returns to reclaim him. Unfortunately Frank is hard-pressed to remember Romy at all, let alone their love, and is thoroughly married with a teenage son, Andi.

Schimmelpfennig treats this mad situation and madder visitor in deadpan seriousness, moderating the comic-realist tone and imposing a sense of dreamy reverie about the play. Romy, when shown the door, remains outside it. When Andi carries her back, injured in a weird stone-throwing incident for which he bears responsibility, the normal, real-world thing to do would be to call an ambulance. Not so here. Romy stays the night in the apartment. This is just the first of the oddnesses. Richard Wilson’s admirably nuanced and low-key production ensures, however, that the actors do not resort to histrionics that would crudely underlie the weirdness of these people.

The structure of The Woman Before also depends upon the serious games that Schimmelpfennig plays with time, in the process disrupting any steady, linear advance. He backtracks minutes or days, jumps forward and then retreats a little, lets us see how the recent past bleeds into the present. The effect is joltingly strange. Some scenes even repeat snatches of what has been said before, as if to remind us of the way we have of mentally replaying significant scenes in which we were involved.

The play’s narrative threads are tautly drawn together. The marriage lines of faith and love are broken as Frank, whom Nigel Lindsay makes the model of bovine inscrutability, turns from Saskia Reeves’ haughty, hostile, hubristic wife and is almost lost to the fanatical Romy. The visitor’s shockingly ingenious revenge on the family is in Greek tragedy mode. It lets us peer into the heart of darkness.

Nicholas de Jongh, EVENING STANDARD, 18 May 2005. 4 stars Strange how the order of a story affects the viewing. Tell a tale backwards, as in Pinter’s Betrayal, and the laws of cause and effect seem strengthened, every choice more poignant. In The Woman Before, German writer Roland Schimmelpfennig goes whichever way he wants. Surtitles appear before every scene: Two minutes later, Ten hours before.

It’s appropriate because this nifty little play is about time. Frank and Claudia (Nigel Lindsay and Saskia Reeves)19 years married, one son, are boxing up their flat for a move. Enter Romy (Helen Baxendale), the woman whom Frank promised, at the age of 20, to love eternally. She is here to hold him to it, convinced that the two decade intermission isn’t a deal-breaker.

Those who sensed eeriness to Baxendale in Cold Feet mode will be pleased to see the same nervous femininity played to darker effect here. Romy’s quest is, of course, futile. Time and again Schimmelpfennig jumps to moments of seeming clarity, then complicates matters, revealing what went before. Meanwhile, packed boxes crowd the stage, monuments to a history whose destruction the revisionist Romy requires.

These themes have national resonance in the author’s native Germany. In Richard Wilson’s production, they can feel inconsequential. Yet this remains a sweet nugget of a show, a journey from farcical premise to tragic, Euripidean conclusion. Though it is rarely emotionally involving, it is always fun.

KIERON QUIRKE, Metro, 19 May, 2005.

Here’s a rum coincidence. In the past week, the Royal Court has opened two plays that jump about in time in a dizzying, resolutely non-linear fashion. That, though, is pretty much where the similarity ends.

Performed in the Theatre Upstairs, David Eldridge’s Incomplete and Random Acts of Kindness makes fluid and lightning temporal shifts in an effort to get inside the psychology of a thirtysomething man who becomes disconnected from the world and from himself after the death of his mother.

Now in the main downstairs theatre, we have Richard Wilson’s slickly directed premiere of The Woman Before, an intriguing new play by the German dramatist Roland Schimmelpfennig. Here the accent is on black absurdity leading to horror, and the mocking about with chronology is conducted in a spirit of deadpan mordant mischief. This is the basic situation. The piece is set in the large hallway of a flat that is just about to be vacated by a fortysomething couple, Frank and Claudia (Nigel Lindsay and Saskia Reeves) and their 19-year-old son Andi (Tom Riley). This is where they have always lived, but now they are about to embark on a new life abroad and the hall is full of packing-cases.

But then out of the blue an attractive woman lands on their threshold. Twenty-four years ago during a brief relationship with her, Frank had made the usual claims of undying love and had sung her the pop song that vows “Will I wait a lonely lifetime/If you want me to, I will.” Played with a quietly implacable sense of entitlement by the excellent Helen Baxendale, Romy Vogtlander (for it is she) has finally come to claim her man. Sent on her way by the appalled wife, Romy winds up being brought back into the flat, unconscious and in the arms of their son, having been struck in the street by a stone thrown by Andi’s soon-to-be-deserted girlfriend, Tina (Georgia Taylor). In a play that otherwise maintains a dottily strict unity of place, it’s Tina’s worried eyewitness observation of the block of flats that gives us the one external perspective.

The absurd, comically malign premise of the piece is rendered more absurd and comically malign in its development by the ceaseless temporal trickery of the story-telling. A scene will be played and then with a whooshing noise, a dip of lights, a flash of the green neon-frame round Mark Thompson’s witty set, and a large sign indicating Ten minutes earlier or Later that night around half past three or Two days earlier etc, it will be run again to let you see what immediately preceded it or be put in a fresh perspective by the revelation of past or future events. The effect is one of fracture and fractiousness and, though occasionally perplexed, the audience looks down on events from a superior plane.

In The Woman Before, the jumps and rewinds and leaps forward deliberately draw attention to their own artificiality. They point up the ironies of a situation in which Frank can’t even recall Romy when he first claps eyes on her again and in which this woman seductively lures the son into repeating the crime of faithlessness (against Tina) which she feels his father committed against her.

Nigel Lindsay is beautifully bemused and tempted as Frank, while Saskia Reeves is very clever casting as the wife. We know from her terrific performance in Stephen Poliakoff’s Sweet Panic that she can communicate the quiet obsessiveness of a stalker. Here, she makes Claudia’s justified suspiciousness of Frank (who, by never mentioning Romy, indicates that she either meant nothing to him or too much) stray into morbidity. How great was their marriage, in fact? Unlike in Eldridge’s play, the characters here seem to be doubly the victims of a trick inflicted both by fate and by the dramatist.

PAUL TAYLOR, Independent, 19 May 2005.

Roland Schimmelpfennig’s short , sharp, cerebral new play is constructed around an unlikely but not, in the age of Friends Reunited, wholly far fetched hypothesis: what if the person to whom you first swore undying devotion came back, years later, and demanded that you make good your pledge? What if they insisted you carry on with that early passion as though the intervening years had never happened?

When we first see Nigel Lindsay’s bespectacled Frank sorting through packing cases in a grand hallway on the eve of departing overseas, he’s trying to dismiss the idea that his spouse of 19 years Saskia Reeve’s still-sexy Claudia heard another woman voice in the shower. Claudia is not taken in, however and sure enough, there behind the front door stands Helen Baxendale’s ravishing Romy, her face expectant, her tone matter-of-fact: “Twenty-four years ago this man was the love of my life,” she explains. “We were lovers then. And we still are now” a declaration that earns Frank a slap from his bewildered other half.

Then we’re suddenly whisked back 10 minutes to the encounter Frank has sought to conceal. Schimmelpfennig, whose text is translated by David Tushingham, offsets his precision tooled Teutonic logic against a cool playfulness. Giving time the runaround, he rewinds and fast-forwards across 48 hours to create a teasing, suspenseful arrangement of scenelets and repeated moments. The effect, droll and disturbing, is like being placed inside the head of someone who can’t distinguish past from present.

If the ending which reaches after an uber- climax worthy of a Greek tragedy feels botched, that doesn’t lessen the evening’s overall power.

Now in his late thirties, Schimmelpfennig is perfectly-placed to recall the absurd absolutism of adolescence and confront the dilemmas of middle-age. Romy, as played with an unnerving, deadpan intensity by Baxendale, is clearly borderline psychotic and yet perhaps she holds out the prospect of salvation from the rut of marriage and family life.

And who could blame her for being enraged at the fickleness Frank’s teenage son Andi shows towards his own soon-to-be-abandoned sweetheart: personal history repeating itself right before her eyes?

Richard Wilson directs with exemplary, understated assurance, his strong cast bolstered by a promising professional debut from Tom Riley as Andi. Schimmelpfennig seems to mean “mouldy coin” in German but there’s something about his play, which captures the terrifying tenacity of first love, that feels dazzingly new-minted.

Dominic Cavendish, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH, 22 May 2005

Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play is about the great whirligig of time, which brings in its revenges smoothly, like a great silver Merc. Frank (Nigel Lindsay) has been married for 19 years to Claudia (Saskia Reeves). They are moving somewhere overseas. A knock on the door, and Frank’s past reappears in the form of Romy (Helen Baxendale), who had been his lover one summer 24 years ago. Poor Frank swore everlasting love, and now Romy comes to reclaim him. But first it is the turn of Frank son Andi (Tom Riley), who becomes her victim in more ways than one. The play keeps moving back and forth in time, a device that seems sophisticated, but needs to be used with care. Here, it is as if Schimmelpfennig were tipping you a wink about his discovery that whatever happens, something else will have happened before. Given that the play is partly about whether you can obliterate the past, this is pretty small change. You feel there is something mythological about Romy, her fierceness and inexplicable arrival, and you are not disappointed. She brings about an unbelievable but shocking ending, rather like that of Euripides’ Medea, where the heroine’s rival is horribly destroyed by a lethal gift. Richard Wilson directs with a cool, minimalist ferocity.

John Peter, SUNDAY TIMES, 22 May 2005

Roland Schimmelpfennig’s arresting and disconcerting play The Woman Before begins as a comedy, and just when you’re not expecting it, escalates into a revenge tragedy on a scale matched by only the most extreme characters from Greek myths.

Schimmelpfennig’s technique is delightfully playful: imagine a videotape being stopped and started so you see a scene and then wind back further to watch the one that immediately precedes it, giving it a lovely ironic twist.

Does one thing inevitably lead to another? How different things might have been if, for instance, Frank had called an ambulance when his son brings the body of a woman he believes he murdered into the house instead of squabbling with his wife about what to do with her?

Moreover, through the characters of the son, Andi, and Tina, his teenage girlfriend (Georgia Taylor from Coronation Street), who are on the brink of parting before the move, the playwright highlights the all-consuming intensity of young love. Tina is refusing to let go, while Andi is having no trouble moving on.

While the play is perhaps more concerned with style than penetrating psychological insight, the style is so sharp, Richard Wilson’s direction so tight, the performances so precise, and what happens so consistently startling, you enjoy every one of its discomforting 75 minutes.

Georgina Brown, MAIL ON SUNDAY, 22 May 2005

When a girlfriend he hasn’t seen for 24 years arrives at Frank’s door, claiming they are still in love, he’s bemused. His wife, (a cool Saskia Reeves) is understandably appalled, and we’re all set for an absurdist marital comedy: Pinter’s Betrayal with a better wardrobe.

But it soon becomes clear that Romy (Helen Baxendale) is badly damaged, fixated on a teenage love affair Frank can scarcely remember (the monstrous egotism of first love echoed in the subplot between Frank’s son and his girlfriend). And yet nothing is what it seems in Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play (in a translation by David Tushingham). Romy, who first commands our sympathy, appears increasingly manipulative, while Frank and Claudia are genuinely vulnerable.

Romy seduces the son, and tempts Frank to run away with her. But then in a final scene of Greek violence, bodies are defied and scorched. Are we supposed to take this literally? Is it a metaphor? Or another middle-aged husband getting his comeuppance?

But then the penny drops. Any post-war German playwright knows about apocalyptic guilt. The dispossessed family, the luggage in the hall, the locked rooms containing horrors…it all has a dreamlike inevitability.

Performances in Richard Wilson production are excellent, but it’s Baxendale in her green coat who will blow the memory of Cold Feet’s Rachel out of the water.

Liz Hoggard, THE OBSERVER, 22 May 2005

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