The Royal Court’s three-month season celebrating the work of American playwright (and actor) Wallace Shawn kicked off on Monday (6 April 2009, previews from 1 April) with a revival of his 1991 monologue The Fever, which runs in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs until 2 May 2009 (See News, 6 Nov 2008).
A privileged traveller visits a poor foreign country and becomes ill. As the traveller’s temperature rises, they contemplate the impact their life has had on the world.
Originally performed by Shawn himself, the piece is written in a gender non-specific way so that it can be done by a man or woman. This new production – directed by Court artistic director Dominic Cooke on an undressed stage, with lighting by Jean Kalman – stars Clare Higgins (pictured).
The Wallace Shawn season continues in May with Cooke’s Downstairs production of 1985’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, in which Jane Horrocks plays Lemon’s intoxicating and dangerous relative, and Upstairs, with the world premiere of Grasses of a Thousand Colours, directed by Andre Gregory and starring Shawn himself opposite Miranda Richardson.
Overnight’s critics’ views on the merits of Shawn’s script ranged widely from “brilliant” and “challenging” to “preposterous” and “insufferable”, largely depending on how palatable they found his central arguments concerning Western, middle-class guilt. However, most recognised that, in the current economic meltdown, this revival is “especially topical”, and all were impressed by the performance of the “always excellent” Clare Higgins.
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Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (four stars)— “The American playwright Wallace Shawn doesn’t think theatre is worthwhile unless it makes you squirm at least a little bit, and The Fever, a disturbing monologue which he first played at the Royal Court himself (in the Upstairs studio in 1991) certainly gets under your skin. Well, it got under my skin in Shawn’s performance and it certainly does again in Clare Higgins’ riveting account on the main stage … The traveller, in this case Higgins, describes an execution she knows is happening that morning. It’s as if she’s there. She then drifts in and out of memories and dreams, making connections between the poor and the privileged, re-defining the philosophy of Karl Marx … The play somehow incorporates political hypocrisy into the stew as well, even as it reveals a mind perturbed by the impossibility of taking positive action that means anything while luxuriating in the pleasures of art and clean bed linen. It’s a brilliant play and a great start to the three-month Wallace Shawn season in Sloane Square.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (two stars) — “Affluent left-wing writers of distinction and their supportive tribes in London and Manhattan, eager to inflict the still sharp pricks of masochism upon themselves for clinging to wealth at the expense of the poor, revere Wallace Shawn and this preposterous play of his, dating from 1990. Holed up in some poor, civil war-ridden country in the bathroom of a lousy hotel with only a water bug for company, a conscience-laden American delivers an interminable, 90-minute monologue, whose diffuse, repetitive nature is presumably attributable to the shivers and shakes of fever. As an indictment of guiltily selfish American materialism, though without a flicker of Shavian wit or authentic iconoclasm, The Fever cannot be faulted, even if its embroidered variations on the theme keep striking repetitive chords.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (three stars) – “I was bowled over by Wallace Shawn‘s 90-minute monologue the first time I heard it: I was not used to sitting in theatres and encountering such a naked assault on our privileged existence. And even if I am now more aware of Shawn’s occasional prolixity, I still admire the piece’s moral force, here superbly articulated by Clare Higgins …The strength of the piece, particularly in the light of the current global crisis, is its ability to hit nails squarely on the head: in particular, Shawn skewers the myth of gradualist reform of the unequal distribution of the world’s resources … The piece started out as a private performance, but it adjusts well to the public stage and, under Dominic Cooke‘s direction, is rendered with escalating power by Higgins … In the end, Shawn is reminding us of a basic truth: that no man is an island. And I am more than happy to put up with the odd longueur to receive such a salutary message.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph (three stars) — “In The Fever (1990), which Wallace Shawn describes as his most autobiographical play, he describes a terrible attack of liberal guilt. Staying in some hellhole of a Third World country and taken ill in the middle of the night, he crouches over the lavatory bowl in his bug-infested bathroom, and comes to the conclusion that, ‘The life I live is irredeemably corrupt’ … The Fever was originally performed by Shawn himself, whose plump, smug demeanour made it particularly insufferable when I saw it at the Royal Court back in 1991 …On this occasion that magnificent actress Clare Higgins is playing the wracked American protagonist. Simply dressed in jeans and a white shirt, she delivers the monologue from the Court’s artfully undecorated main stage with admirable fluency, humanity, wit and anguish in an attentive production by Dominic Cooke. What even she cannot disguise, however, is the repellent solipsism of the writing, its irritating false naivety, and the feeling that the author is showing off his psychic wounds like some manipulative crippled beggar.”
Benedict Nightingale in The Times (three stars) – “Have you passed by a sickly youth sitting on the pavement with a mangy dog and a hand held out, telling yourself that he’d only spend your money on drugs?… I have, and I too have been left with the feelings of guilt and resentment that Wallace Shawn clearly felt when he wrote this monologue in 1991 — and Clare Higgins convinced me she also felt when she delivered it …In her midnight mood she decides she’s basically so complicit in beggary, poverty, oppression, torture, state murder, everything that’s bad, that she and her equally well-to-do friends are ‘irredeemably corrupt’… The Fever is, I suppose, especially topical at a time when the richer nations and individuals are doing their damnedest to cling on to their prosperity. But is selfishness all around? Aren’t the G20 leaders, let alone the world’s charities, showing some responsibility for poor nations? The Fever is that rare thing, genuinely challenging. Also, it’s performed with a fine blend of feeling and incisiveness by the always excellent Higgins. Yet to praise her on aesthetic grounds is to miss the play’s point. Those of us who spend our pounds on theatre, opera, music, art are, after all, among the world’s exploiters.”
– by Terri Paddock & Katie Blemler
