Duet for One

Synopsis

With strong echoes of the life and experiences of celebrated cellist Jacqueline du Pre running through it, the play tells of Stephanie, an eminent violinist, who has been confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. On her husband's advice she consults a psychiatrist to help her come to terms with a life deprived of its main purpose. Under the quiet probing questions, layer after layer of protective pretence is stripped from her, revealing dangerous depths of resentment and despair.

Our Review:

13 May 2009

Transferring from the Almeida to the Vaudeville, Matthew Lloyd’s revival of Tom Kempinski’s 1980 two-hander has edged more clearly to becoming a love story between a taciturn Jewish doctor and his vibrant, frustrated patient, confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis.

But the enigma of their relationship, and the great holes in our knowledge of the doctor – how “put on”, really, is his German accent, where is his family, why is his study done up like the Freud museum in Hampstead? – do not make for dramatic complexity but a sense of incompleteness.

And dramatically, the show is one way traffic as Juliet Stevenson’s needy and despairing musician, a concert violinist cut down in her prime, recounts her growing irritability (yes, she does become rather annoying after a while), her sexual frustration, her lurch towards suicidal determination.

We’re also never sure what kind of doctor Feldmann actually is. ...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 8 July 2009:

As someone who works in primary healthcare, I have found it hard to forgive Juliet Stevenson for her misguided and dangerous involvement in the campaign to link the MMR jab with autism. That memory has now been erased though by her brilliant and intensely believable performance as violinist and MS sufferer Stephanie Abrahams. At the inetrval I thought that Henry Goodman's irritatingly passive psychiatrist was a wannabe attempting to experience vicarious musical genius. In a blazing second half he transformed, almost pysically imposing a reason and will to live in his now tragically diminished patient. The closing scene saw Abrahams reassert control of her own life, but not necessarily in the way Dr. Feldmann hoped, given his clear unrequited feelings. Stevenson and Goodman both give career-defining performances in Tom Kempinski's superb play which manages to be funny, moving and massively thought-provoking....

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