Dimetos

A powerhouse performance by Jonathan Pryce just about keeps Athol Fugard’s strange 1975 play afloat, although the audience has to work hard to figure out the metaphor in the story of a reclusive engineer who’s left the city and taken up with his housekeeper Sophia (Anne Reid) and niece Lydia (Holliday Grainger) in a remote village.

There they are visited by civic official Danilo (Alex Lanipekun), who wants Dimetos to return to full civic employment, not waste his time being “a handyman for the peasants.” But Dimetos is wrestling with his demons, and the idea of the beauty of work for its own sake. And he’s tragically obsessed with the attractive young Lydia.

Pryce and his director Douglas Hodge have removed any sense of this being a play about Fugard’s South Africa. Instead, it’s a play about the skill of the artisan, the expressive formulations of hands using materials, clay, rope or pulleys. Bunny Christie’s bare boards design on two levels has a platform decked out with hoists, ladders and rigging.

In a striking first scene, semi-naked Lydia is let down on a rope from the full height of the Donmar into a well to rescue a trapped horse, the writhing figure we later know to be Danilo. Lydia’s ecstasy moves Dimetos to engineer a more explicitly sexual opening for the girl by inviting Danilo to stay for a few days, and the consequences are disastrous.

Pryce moves through the play with a ferocious energy as first a sort of mixed-up version of Eddie Carbone and Prospero and then as an old man of the seaside, five years later, a chastened Timon of Athens, moving into madness, still attended by the reproachful Sophia and visited by the distraught Danilo, seeking punishment and justice.

It’s a wonderful performance in a play that is reluctant to yield its full meaning. The shore of the last scene is infected with the smells emanating from the rotting carcass of a dead mammal on a rock.

Is this beast Dimetos/Prometheus himself, or is it the symbol of a guilt that has rendered him a scavenging and desperate creator in the haunted gloom of his own drive and obsessions? A personal play, then, and finally one about the artist’s cannibalisation of his own life and the materials of his profession. And Pryce gives it his very best shot.

– Michael Coveney