The World's Biggest Diamond ( Archived )

Reviews

The World’s Biggest Diamond5 stars I came out shaken and shattered. Gregory Motton’s play makes Strindberg, 11 of whose plays he has translated, look like Enid Bagnold. This is a play about love: love as need, love as loss, love as guilt, pain, resentment, unacknowledged regret and a festering but unbreakable bond. He (Michael Feast) is 73, and hasn’t long to live. She (Jane Asher) is 60, cool and svelte, and now in her second marriage. They had a six-year affair that ended 30 years ago; he wouldn’t leave his wife and children. Will she nurse him now until he dies? Does she want to? Does he want her to? The fury of years of loneliness and unfulfilled need burns through and through the play. They are middle-class people, intelligent, educated and compulsively articulate – they know how to hurt. The writing has a scorching eloquence, and the actors give the finest performances of their careers: two ravaged people, haunted by each other and their former selves. Subtly and painfully, they reveal what they had meant to each other, the secret heart of each that only the other can see.

John Peter, SUNDAY TIMES CULTURE, 13 November

The World’s Biggest Diamond, a new play by Gregory Motton, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, is a moving, painful play about two ex-lovers who are reunited towards the end of their lives.

Rebecca Tyrrell, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH – SEVEN MAGAZINE, 13 November 2005

The geometry of love is delicately traced in Gregory Motton’s new play. In a crumbling seaside cottage, 60 year-old Mrs Thomas is visiting Mr Smith, her ex-lover, after 30 years of separation. Her husband remains tactfully out of sight upstairs in a bedroom that fills with choking smoke each time Mr Smith, frail, elderly and dying, lights the fire in his own room. Meanwhile, in an act of mutual tender torture, Mrs Thomas and Mr Smith examine what remains between them. As they rake over the past, their conversations are obsessively circular; their relationship, once triangular, as Mr Smith was married when they were lovers, now has a fourth corner – Mrs Thomas’s husband. It has become diamond-shaped.

Whether a love that has consumed both their lives and left them lonely, afraid and miserable is really a rare and precious jewel is the question at the play’s heart. And diamonds, hard and bright, able both to endure and to cut, eloquently symbolise a passion that refuses to die, yet continues to cause so much pain.

Motton also draws a potent comparison between love’s madness and the clutter of the everyday. One of Mr Smith and Mrs Thomas’s most agonising arguments is interrupted by the sound of the latter’s unseen husband flushing the toilet. The mundane pricks the bubble of romance; but of Mrs Thomas, a successful lawyer who stifles her feelings in work and in maintaining the facade of an ordinary, contented existence, and Mr Smith, who is openly in existential agony, which is living the ridiculous lie?

The play is a gossamer creation, so fragile you feel that if you sighed – which, irked by its characters’ self-absorption, you well might – it would blow away.

But Simon Usher’s sensitive production handles it with care, and Jane Asher and Michael Feast give beautifully nuanced, achingly sad performances as the two lost lovers. Feast, with hollow eyes and a voice like broken glass, is bravely unpleasant, spiteful, self-pitying and overflowing with longing. And as her brittle dignity shatters, Asher makes you imagine every bleak, lovesick hour she has spent since their relationship ended. The setting may be small; the acting sparkles.

Sam Marlowe, THE TIMES, 4 November 2005

The World’s Biggest Diamond3 stars Love in the old age is a deeply unfashionable subject in drama, which only makes Gregory Motton’s strange and robust little play all the more welcome.

Afflicted by an unnamed illness, Mr Smith has only months to live. Mrs Thomas, the lover he abandoned 30 years ago, has come to stay with him in his seaside cottage. She has her husband in tow whom we never see. Over a series of bitter conversations, the two pick each other apart as they fight to prove whom is to blame for what, who has suffered the most, who loved the most and what they both have lost.

The terrible question Motton poses is whether or not someone destroyed by love can ever be healed. Certainly, the unsentimental landscape he paints offers little suggestion of consolation. Jane Asher’s Mrs Thomas is uptight, tight-lipped and emotionally frozen but reveals the true cost to herself in her occasional wrenching explosions of maniacal grief. Michael Feast’s grip on Mr Smith is less secure: he is goading, petulant and, perhaps because of his illness, needy. But he never suggests the same sense of devastation.

Motton’s studied naturalism needs to be partnered by a stronger sense of physicality on the stage than Simon Usher’s fussy production provides: a fierce sexual chemistry, for example, is notably absent. Yet Motton’s play is unfailingly honest, which may explain why it can be so difficult to watch.

p(=reviewer-name). Claire Allfree, METRO, 4 November 2005

The lasting pain of love thrown away

The stormy weather and the waves that cut up rough in Gregory Motton’s strangely arresting play about the close encounter of long-lost lovers prove redundant accessories. The World’s Biggest Diamond needs no melodramatic underlining. It makes a big, emotional impression with its metaphysical anguishing about what erotic love-denied or rejected – does to the hearts and minds of the bereft.

In 85 minutes and 10 scenes The World’s Biggest Diamond achieves something difficult and valuable. Rejecting the soft option of having his lovers rake over a past of which only cinders and ashes remain, Motton keeps his couple recriminating and accusing as they struggle to discover what made them give each other up.

The social setting is rarefied for a Royal Court play, with the heroine’s morbid, obsessive qualities recalling two Ibsen heroines and one of Marguerite Duras’s grandes dames. There is, unsurprisingly, some sense of contrivance about the situation that has brought the lovers together again. The scene is the seaside home and bedroom of Michael Feast’s youthful-looking septuagenarian Smith, a writer stricken by something unnamed but terminal.

Despite allusions to Smith’s wife and children, they play no role in his life. He fizzes with resentment, regrets and fear; while Jane Asher’s Mrs. Thomas, a 60 year-old lawyer, who looks 10 sexy years younger, maintains a glacial, formal politeness.

Disbelief has to be suspended. Not only is Mrs. Thomas’s unseen husband installed upstairs, the woman confesses herself quite prepared to desert him by arranging to die with Smith.

Yet something truthful and terrible is captured in the grief-struck, poetic interplay of this Anglo-Saxon, would-be symbiotic couple. Each sees in the other a destroyer and betrayer.

Feast’s fine, goading Smith accuses Thomas of breaking his heart by killing off the loving, feminine aspect of herself and replacing it with the frozen, withdrawn woman she has become.

The response astonishes. Asher; long-standing heiress of the Celia Johnson school of repressed, middle-class gentility, breaks the bonds of that old decorum. Her scream of childlike pain, her desperate, sobbing collapse as she rains blows on the man who takes her in his weal, consoling arms make you vehemently aware of the loss and ruin caused by their separation 30 years earlier. Miss Asher’s shattering performance conveys the torment of that realisation.

Nicholas De Jongh, EVENING STANDARD, 3 November 2005

The World’s Biggest Diamond3 stars See Jane sparkle . . .

Jane Asher, queen of novelty cakes, veteran of Crossroads, former girlfriend of Paul McCartney and wife of Gerald Scarfe, is a surprising choice for a Gregory Motton drama.

Motton is, you see, one of the more difficult writers to have passed through the Royal Court in the past 20 years.

This, however, is one of his more approachable works – although it still has plenty of prickliness. It is, essentially, a love story involving a terminally ill, 73-year-old curmudgeon played by Michael Feast and his former amour, a 60-year-old Parisienne lawyer played by Asher.

It is 30 years since they broke up, but Feast is still furious that she has married a man who has something to do with ballet. Before he dies, he is determined to make Asher reveal to him, one last time, the world’s biggest diamond: namely her inner self, which she guards jealousy with her pride.

Asher, having played second fiddle to Feast’s wife throughout their six-year affair, is loath to yield.

Playwright Motton is, among other things, a maestro of the morose. His intense dialogue – his characters talk in philosophical abstractions about the nature of true love – is tough on his actors and his audience. What this pair is really raking over is not just the past, but the life and death. And, even worse than fear of death, the regret of a life not fully lived.

Nonetheless, a gaunt-looking Feast gropes his way through his characters’ frozen anger towards something more touching and tender.

Asher, meanwhile, looks amazing: 59 going on 29. And if she, too, seems uptight, it is merely due to the effort required to staunch the wounds left by Feast.

And just as the emotional battle of attrition gets the better of the characters, so this gloomy play gets its tentacles around your heart, leaving you wanting it to end, and yet to roll on.

Patrick Marmion, THE DAILY MAIL, 4 November 2005 3 stars The World’s Biggest Diamond

Gregory Motton’s new play is a bit of a tune-up for the book. In place of the antic surrealism that has made him so popular in Paris, he offers us a naturalistic study of the reunion of two old lovers. My guess is that Motton, a prolific Strindberg translator, is heavily under the spell of the Swedish master’s preoccupation with the febrile neurosis of passion.

Motton’s pair certainly show that pain and anguish don’t disappear with the bus pass. Mr. Smith is a dying, 73 year-old writer living in a remote seaside cottage. There he is visited by Mrs. Thomas, a 60 year-old lawyer, accompanied by her third husband whom frustratingly we never see. And over 10 scenes the two oldies pick over the unhealed scars of a relationship that ended tragically 30 years ago.

As Smith says, amid the mutual recrimination, “both of us seem to think we are the keeper of the true flame of love and that the other is trying to blow it out.”

Creditably, Motton passes no moral judgment on his characters: what he conveys is the waste of two mis-spent lives.

… the acting at the Theatre Upstairs, under Simon Usher’s direction, is wonderful.

…Asher beautifully shows the woman’s glacial fade slowly thawing out of concern for her dying lover and from memories of lost happiness: her sudden smile on the recollection of ice cream getting into her eye hints at her long-suppressed tenderness. And Feast lends the solipsistic old recluse, who feels “we are all alone with God in his nasty dead universe,” a neo-Beckettian bitterness.

Michael Billington, THE GUARDIAN, 3 November 2005