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| Owen Teale & Zoe Wanamaker in Passion Play |
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Date: 9 May 2013
Following the recent Privates On Parade, another play by Peter Nichols has been revived in the West End - his 1981 drama Passion Play.
The play, last seen in the West End in 2000, charts the collapse of a 25-year of marriage as a successful man still in love with his wife is attracted to a younger and sexually voracious woman whose temptations he's unable to resist. As trust collapses, husband and wife Eleanor and James are left floundering and exposed - along with their alter-egos...
The cast features Owen Teale, Samantha Bond, Oliver Cotton, Annabel Scholey, Sian Thomas and Zoe Wanamaker. David Leveaux directs.
Michael Coveney
Whatsonstage.com
★★★★
Sacred music and secular love: it's a potent combination in Peter Nichols' raw and rasping 1981 adultery play that comes across in this lacerating revival by David Leveaux as a bitter, twisted comedy of human fallibility and carnal ecstasy... Leveaux and his actors never let us off the hook, to the extent even that it becomes hard to differentiate between the inner and outer expressions of the same character... Wanamaker, for instance, becomes increasingly strained and tragic as Bond (or Miss Moneypenny, I suppose we should say, to avoid further confusion) becomes more explicit in her disavowals... Equally, Teale's helplessness becomes a variation on Cotton's splenetic anguish, and the two of them meld into each other, as do the ladies, becoming almost identical twins, like the pairs of masters and slaves in The Comedy of Errors.
Henry Hitchings
Evening Standard
★★★
"This production by David Leveaux manages at its best to be clever and fun, with a strikingly spare design by Hildegard Bechtler. But the writing feels excessively artful. The title is loaded: this is a drama about passion and play in every imaginable sense of those words, and the attempt to drive home its religious implications doesn’t pay off. Although the snippets of Bach and Handel that punctuate the action add grandeur, the best of Nichols is his sour comedy, some of which doesn't quite come through... the novelty of Nichols' technique wears thin and creates some narrative tangles. For all its pleasures this is an oddly small play, which doesn’t say anything new about adultery or marriage."
Oliver Cotton (Jim), Samantha Bond (Nell), Zoë Wanamaker (Eleanor), Annabel Scholey (Kate) and Owen Teale (James)Charles Spencer
Daily Telegraph
★★★★
Nichols' clever conceit is to have two actors playing each spouse in an initially happy 25-year marriage which is strained to breaking point when the husband embarks on an affair with Kate, a woman half his age... This may sound tricksy but it works superbly, to both comic and emotionally devastating effect. At the start of the affair, for instance, James returns home and tells his wife that he has missed her. But Jim, his alter ego, delivers rather different words as he thinks of his lunchtime date: 'Her tongue straight to the back of my mouth, circling like a snake inside'... The doubling of the female characters also allows Nichols to end the play on a fascinating note of ambiguity... David Leveaux’s beautifully judged production does full justice to this ingenious modern classic.
Michael Billington
Guardian
★★★★
For the first half of David Leveaux's revival I was no more than mildly diverted... After the interval, however, the play enters another dimension. That's partly because Nichols ups the ante to show the corrosive consequences of betrayal, partly because I found it impossible to take my eyes off Zoë Wanamaker's Eleanor... It helps that she has Samantha Bond as her other self... If the play still works, it is because it reinforces the point made by Pinter in his own infidelity play: that betrayal doesn't stop in the bedroom. And, even if this production could do with a few more first-half laughs to set up the tonal contrast, it is elegantly designed by Hildegard Bechtler and gets good supporting performances from Annabel Scholey as the under-written Kate and Siân Thomas as another wronged wife seeking vindictive triumph. But it's Wanamaker who gives the evening its distinction by showing, with vivid particularity, how loss of trust in one's partner numbs the sense of self.
Quentin Letts
Daily Mail
Adulterers may want to give Passion Play a miss, despite its voyeuristic frissons. Peter Nichols' play is a fraught depiction of marital betrayal, made all the more unsettling by its tricksy (and confusing) stage device of alter egos. This production has much going for it: strong acting from the likes of Samantha Bond and Zoe Wanamaker, plus a performance of wickedly slinky glamour from Annabel Scholey... So why do I hesitate to give the show four (phwoarr) stars? Because the characters are hard to like and director David Leveaux uses a heavy hand, not least with the blasts of entr'acte oratorio music... Despite these reservations, Passion Play provokes plenty of thought. And cool Miss Scholey, who has more curves than the Monte Carlo racetrack, may provoke reactions from a lower part of the anatomy.
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Date: 8 May 2013
Oliver Cotton (Jim), Samantha Bond (Nell), Zoë Wanamaker (Eleanor), Annabel Scholey (Kate) and Owen Teale (James) Sacred music and secular love: it's a potent combination in Peter Nichols' raw and rasping 1981 adultery play that comes across in this lacerating revival by David Leveaux as a bitter, twisted comedy of human fallibility and carnal ecstasy.
After 25 years, James and Eleanor's marriage is on the rocks - or is it? - because of his affair with a girl younger than his own grown-up children. Owen Teale and Zoe Wanamaker are the couple facing the music, and drowning in it, with Oliver Cotton and Samantha Bond playing their alter egos - Jim and Nell - in scenes of shattering, Strindbergian antagonism and unhappiness.
He is a picture restorer, she sings in choirs, and the girl, Kate, the daughter of a dead friend, is played by a stunning Annabel Scholey, flitting in and out of her clothes as easily as she sheds moral scruples in pursuit of older married men with well-paid jobs and mid-life crises.
This quintet, tearing each other to shreds, is prodded on the sidelines by Sian Thomas as a cynical widow with a social speciality in battered wives. Just when you think Nichols can go no further, he just did.
[WOS_QU@TE]#Leveaux and his actors never let us off the hook[/WOS_QU@TE]
This is why he's such an exhilarating and depressing writer at the same time. And why his jagged, merciless dialogue is so compelling and uncomfortable to sit through. Leveaux and his actors never let us off the hook, to the extent even that it becomes hard to differentiate between the inner and outer expressions of the same character.
Wanamaker, for instance, becomes increasingly strained and tragic as Bond (or Miss Moneypenny, I suppose we should say, to avoid further confusion) becomes more explicit in her disavowals - having entered, stunningly, her own emotional hinterland 50 minutes into the play.
Equally, Teale's helplessness becomes a variation on Cotton's splenetic anguish, and the two of them meld into each other, as do the ladies, becoming almost identical twins, like the pairs of masters and slaves in The Comedy of Errors.
It was Michael Grandage's revival of this remarkable play at the Donmar Warehouse 12 years ago that triggered the Nichols revival, and this version, designed in an antiseptic limbo of white walls and neutral vistas by Hildegard Bechtler, underlines the savagery of Nichols' bleak mid-winter vision in an ironically godless world of unforgivable but totally understandable human weakness and self-indulgence.
Come on our hosted Whatsonstage.com Outing to Passion Play on 11 June 2013 and get your top-price ticket, a FREE programme and access to our EXCLUSIVE post-show Q&A with Zoe Wanamaker and cast all for £35.00! Click here for details
- by Michael Coveney
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