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Extraordinary Theater: Mrs. Klein
| Article
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16104 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1989 |
2,272 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Mrs. Klein, at the Apollo in London's West End, is an extraordinary kind of theatrical success. It is neither a musical like Les Miserables, nor a chunk of soft-core sentimentality in the style of Peter Shaffer masquerading as a 'serious' play. It is not even an evening of resonant trickery with avant-garde pretensions after the manner of Harold Pinter. What it does is take professionally obsessed people--a species of characters whom in real life one would avoid, because they are personally tedious--and transform them into gripping company for at least the space of an evening. To turn this trick, the playwright is lucky enough to have the assistance of very gifted performers, aided and abetted by first-class design and direction. This combination in a new work from a young playwright, especially a piece from one of the big subsidized houses of London (the National Theatre in this case), is unusual. And if such a work has, like Mrs. Klein, transferred to the British equivalent of Broadway--a commercial theater in London's West End--and there held its own, then the unusual becomes almost wonderful.
The author is Nicholas Wright, a transplanted South African who is now literary manager at the National Theatre, where Mrs. Klein was first staged. Wright once worked at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, and by virtue of that, ought to have very left-wing credentials as a playwright. His presence at the National Theatre suggests that he has. But his credits also include translations of Marivaux and Pirandello, and, perhaps closer to the subsidized theater's fashionable norm, a Balzac adaptation.
For his new play he took up Phyllis Grosskurth's biography of the famous child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. From this material he has
... (1995 of 13745 Characters)
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