Talking Cure

No sooner has the National bade farewell to its 19th-century Russian philosophers of The Coast of Utopia than the founding fathers of European psychiatry have arrived to do battle with their minds, egos and emotions in the Cottesloe.

Christopher Hampton's new play The Talking Cure shares a similarly stilted overloading of facts and information as conversation, and likewise has an epic narrative sweep. With 16 short scenes comprising the first act and 11 more in the second that are stretched across five different locations and along a time span of nine years, the script for this could be a screenplay, not a play.

But far from hurtling forward in a Stoppardian blaze of words and ideas, Hampton's writing has an altogether more pedestrian feel. One fears he's been paddling for too long in the sharp but shallow world of Yasmina Reza translations and the efficient but formulaic book for the musical Sunset Boulevard. The Talking Cure has a surface sheen and is full of learned but limp jokes like "I love Nietzsche, although I could never bring myself to approve of his moustache", but it's a slow burn that never really catches fire dramatically.

Yet it is full of individually fascinating characters and Hampton has threaded their interactions through a potentially riveting narrative where intellectual theories and human behaviour constantly collide. When Carl Gustav Jung, assistant director at a public asylum in Zurich, takes on a disturbed new young female patient, Sabina Spielrein, he decides to try out a new theory of treatment on her: Freud's "radical therapeutic idea", the talking cure of psychoanalysis.

As he cures her of her hysteria, he also falls in love with her; and as he advances Freud's theories beyond providing patients with an understanding of who they are into what they could be, the protégée that Jung was turns into a rival and adversary. Meanwhile, the former patient becomes a doctor herself and a living exponent of the work, while Otto Gross, another patient of Jung's, offers a powerful lesson in seizing one's passions. "Never repress anything!" he declares.

Otto, played with fiery passion by Dominic Rowan in his two short scenes, gives the play a theatrical charge that it lacks elsewhere as it earnestly attempts to paint on a wider psychological canvas. Rowan also now plays Freud (replacing the late James Hazeldine who withdrew from the play the day before the original press night and died a week later) but is markedly too young for the role as Jung's senior. As Jung himself, Ralph Fiennes beautifully registers the complexity of the man and his struggle to contain his propriety and his passion for Jodhi May's remarkable Spielrein.

But everyone is also somewhat dwarfed by Howard Davies' mammoth staging in a completely reconfigured Cottesloe that, given the immense width and three-tier height of Tim Hatley's set, might have sat far more comfortably in the Lyttelton (and, given the demand for tickets because of Fiennes' presence in the cast, would have made more commercial sense, too).

- Mark Shenton