Five Gold Rings

Premiered at west London’s Gate Theatre in 2000, Joanna Laurens‘ first play, The Three Birds, won her many accolades, including the Critics’ Circle award for Most Promising Playwright. Three years on and her second play is getting the kind of treatment most long-established dramatists would kill for – a top-notch cast (not least Damian Lewis, who returns to the stage after a long absence spent getting famous for screen roles in Band of Brothers and The Forsyte Saga) in a stylish production at the very stylish Almeida Theatre, stylishly directed by the artistic director (Michael Attenborough) himself.

Henry (David Calder) – who lives alone and destitute in the desert (a tipped up sundial of a set by Es Devlin), his wife having long deserted him – welcomes his two grown sons home for Christmas. Both Daniel (Lewis) and Simon (Will Keen) are having marital problems of their own. The first claims impotence and the second denies sterility to the frustration of their wives, Freyja (Indira Varma) and Miranda (Helen McCrory), who seek external solace.

Though the secrets of the fraternal relationship are never satisfyingly mined, without doubt, there is dramatic potential in Laurens’ scenario – and in the yearning ache of “what it is to love and not to have” – especially when played out by such a handsomely charismatic cast. But, oh, what tedium we get instead due to the author’s unremitting commitment to a strange and self-consciously non-naturalistic language.

Opting to write in verse instead of prose, Laurens throws into her linguistic jumble pinches of archaic, modern and made-up vocabulary as well as generous ladlefuls of gross grammar, inversion, truncation and other structural oddities. An awful lot of effort has clearly gone into this, but the result more often than not comes across like Yoda making clunky literal translations from a German soap opera script: “this is all I have the worth of giving”, “give it you back me”.

To their immense credit, the cast do occasionally manage to redeem this awkward speech – particularly at moments of the most heightened emotion, when the poetics are somewhat more apt – but sooner or later each in their turn is laid low by some truly risible lines, made all the more embarrassing for repetition. How awful for the libidinously challenged Lewis to have to say “she sings my stick asleep” not once but three times (maybe more, I stopped counting for decency’s sake). At least, during his deliciously sexy mating dance with McCrory, words are kept to a minimum – and the stick seems to function just fine. But it’s all too brief.

As an experiment in syntax, Five Gold Rings is an intriguing but finally wearying one. What’s needed is more suspense and less pretence.

– Terri Paddock