Finding the Sun/Marriage Play

The National’s faulty new writing policy is revealed in this
bizarre resurrection of two slight one acters by Edward Albee, written in
the 1980s, virtually forgotten, but now receiving their British premiere here.

The now 73-year-old playwright – still best known for one of his earliest
plays, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, written in 1961 – had a late
career recovery with the heavily autobiographical Pulitzer Prize-winning
Three Tall Women some three decades later, but in between those two
landmarks, came only A Delicate Balance and many a dead-end dramatic
detour. These two short plays hail, alas, from that long in-between period;
and while it’s always tempting to reclaim some of a newly popularised
playwright’s more neglected works, this kind of pandering does him, and us,
no favours.

The first play, Marriage Play, is another re-run of Virginia
Woolf‘s warring central couple, George and Martha, this time Jack and
Gillian – though they don’t draw anyone else into their web
of mutual destruction. Sadly, their wisecracks don’t fly as fast, either,
though Albee teases out a basic idea – Jack announcing to Gillian that their
30-year-old marriage is over – with sometimes painful observation, acutely
played to the hilt by Bill Paterson and Sheila Gish. But,
in Anthony Page‘s production (for which the action has been switched from
America to Richmond, Surrey), it feels stagey and uninvolving, for all the
integrity of the performances.

The second play, Finding the Sun, is slighter still, but in its way,
a polished, bittersweet beach sex comedy, with darker undercurrents of
betrayal and death running through it. Set on a New England beach, four
couples – three related to each other – take in the sun. A mother (
Gish again) fusses over her attractive teenage son (Edward Hughes) as they
observe the other couples on the beach. Benjamin (Patrick Baladi), now
unhappily married to Abigail (Pauline Lynch), longs to be with his former
lover, Daniel (Demetri Goritsas), now married to Cordelia (Polly
Walker). Meanwhile, the elderly Gertrude (Sheila Burrrell) and Henden
(Edward de Souza), now married to each other, turn out to be the parents
(from earlier marriages) of two of the above.

The plays, not written as a pair, have been brought together by director
Page, who chanced upon them browsing in a New York bookshop, and
talked Trevor Nunn into letting him put them on at the National. It’s a pity
then that Page’s productions of them aren’t more persuasive than his obvious powers
of persuasion. And in a year in which the Hampstead Theatre, for instance, has
already offered Alistair Beaton’s Feelgood, Jonathan Harvey’s
Out in the Open and Philip Osment’s Buried Alive, the Royal
Court has presented Kevin Elyot’s Mouth to Mouth, and the dear old
West End has even managed a major entry with Simon Gray’s Japes, it
beggars belief that the National Theatre can’t compete with any of those but
has to trawl the bookshelves of a theatre bookshop to find new work.

Mark Shenton