Treats
As a comedy of modern sexual mores in a triangular arrangement, Christopher Hampton’s Treats bears comparison with Noel Coward’s Design for Living or Patrick Marber’s Closer. Historically, it bisects both plays, dating from 1976 but never really punching its weight in either the playwright’s oeuvre or the public esteem.
Laurence Boswell’s production is a bit of a discovery and has taken me by surprise on several counts. Billie Piper is really rather good as the assailed and mixed-up Ann, the character Hampton conceived as a reaction to Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House (a play he translated in the early 1970s): she goes out, slams the door, but comes back.
And in slightly adjusting his text to allow the ghastly, coke-snorting, womanising journalist Dave – he’s “had” 42 women during his two years of bullying and despising Ann – to be on leave from duty in Basra rather than Beirut (staying in the Dorchester, not the Savoy), Hampton has re-energised his stark, moral fable of dangerous liaisons.
One can now see how he wanted to reclaim that brilliant 1985 adaptation of the French epistolary drama for his own generation. The original Treats at the Royal Court looked sadly out of its theatrical time. The Hampstead version in 1989 was just dull. This production restores the pain and pleasure of Hampton’s original as a tart and truculent comedy.
The little black book of available afternoon dates is replaced by a Blackberry, and Kate Adie and the demonstration in Tiananmen Square feature as political reference points. But the musical back-ups are the glorious same, from Bruckner’s fourth symphony to the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline” and the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”
Piper is suspended between the old boyfriend and the new boredom. One could possibly read into this the media-led frenzy about Billie’s supposed oscillation between ex-husband and good chum Chris Evans and her new inamorata, Laurence Fox, her on-stage Patrick. This off-stage drama has undoubtedly fuelled the on-stage comedy, and all to the good.
Late in the play, which is pleasantly short at just under two hours including a long interval, Kris Marshall’s splendidly supercilious Dave remarks that Patrick always looked like someone who’s just stepped into an empty lift shaft. The comment gets the right laugh because Fox has played for that gag all evening and the choice Ann must make – is it just about sex appeal? — will inform the strange, dying fall of the play’s end.
The violence of the opening scene, where Dave punches Patrick on the nose and calmly enquires – “Any messages?” — is typical of a show that mixes good and bad behaviour like cocktail ingredients. How people treat each other partly explains the title; and so does the idea that going to bed with a former girlfriend for five minutes constitutes “just a little treat”.
The play might now be reassessed as Hampton’s comic masterpiece. And Piper manages to be both a compellingly attractive but dramatically disastrous siren, and an intelligent assessor of her sexual options. She’s very good indeed. And another excellent play is restored.
– Michael Coveney
