Equally Divided (Watford, Palace Theatre)
Money may make the
world turn around more smoothly on its axis but it can create an
avalanche of jagged emotions within a family. Take the two sisters in
Ronald Harwood‘s 1998 comedy – though tragicomedy might be a
fairer description. Their parents were refugees from Hitler‘s
Europe but are now dead, their mother only recently. They appear to
be joint inheritrices, though their life patterns have diverged
extraordinarily.
first is frumpy Edith, the stay-at-home daughter – home being a
south-coast house made out of old railway carriages. She has been
her mother’s companion and, latterly, her carer. Renata flew the nest
early on, has made wealthy marriages (and even more lucrative divorce
settlements); she simply came for the funeral and the reading of the
will. That vital document is in the care of the family solicitor
Charles, a widower with an attention-span strongly resembling cotton-wool.
Laughs there are
a-plenty, but the underlying dilemmas for all three – and for the
actor-turned-antique-dealer invited by Edith to give an independent
valuation – are serious enough. We all know carer-daughters who
somehow miss out on the lives their siblings enjoy. Some of us have
had dealings with solicitors whose mental world seems so far removed
from that of their clients that you wonder how they ever managed to
pass the Law Society’s examinations. And, as for the antiques
expert…
Brigid Larmour‘s
production gives a fair crack of the theatrical whip to each
character in turn. Beverley Klein‘s Edith dominates – and you end up
being completely on her side, though her two monologues do tend to be
over-stretched out. But it’s a rounded portrait of someone who, both
in real life and onstage, can be treated as someone easily passed
over and ignored. Katharine Rogers has the right sort of spiky
elegance as Renata, a worldly woman who knows her rights – and can
judge a man (any man) in an instance.
If Charles bumbles and
fumbles, and Walter van Dyk certainly makes him the epitome of
that, then Gregory Gudgeon as Fabian is Lovejoy with quotes,
spouting verse at the drop of a cue in between checking makers’ marks
on anything from a Hepplewhite table to a coffee pot or enamelled
miniature. Gudgeon has in many ways the easiest part; you know from
the beginning that Fabian is a rogue, but you warm to his own
enjoyment of his preposterous personality.
The set by Ruari
Murchison is long, low and narrow. It suggests its inhabitants’
ability to combine a degree of improvisation and making-do with an
all-important gemütlich. Now what was a home with comforts has
become a prison, for Edith at any rate. Harwood leaves us guessing as
to how she will escape, if she does. We are, after all, in 1997,
which was supposed to mark the start of a brave new world. I wonder
what happened to it.
