Woman Before

Roland Schimmelpfenning’s feeble new domestic drama The Woman Before is deadly, in every sense.

Its story of a man whose past comes back to haunt him when an ex-partner of 24 years ago arrives unannounced, and barely remembered by him, at the front door of the home he shares with his wife of 19 years and their teenage son, is initially intriguing. But it proceeds to be ultimately wearying as the woman, Romy, desperately tries to reclaim him. The play fires through 28 scenes, some terse, some tense, in barely 75 minutes, and gradually becomes as annoying as it is meant to be disquieting.

As these scenes, played out over a night and morning, are performed in a scrambled sequence that jumps rapidly between different time frames, sometimes of barely moments, sometimes of hours, the suspicion dawns that The Woman Before is all form and no content.

Yes, it’s a method of sustaining interest in the storyline of a long-lost lover who turns suddenly vengeful. But the motivations of each character – and the coincidences that sustain its plotting, when the married couple’s son somehow injures the former partner as she leaves their apartment building so she’s taken in for the night – are neither fully explained nor ever believable.

The drama relies entirely on the mood of troubled, brooding menace that Richard Wilson’s production manages to wring out of the proceedings. However, despite the strong efforts of a cast that includes Nigel Lindsay and Saskia Reeves as the married couple and Helen Baxendale as the stalker, I wasn’t so much gripped as appalled that this piece of continental chic should be given house room at one of our premiere venues for new writing.

It’s not just Mark Thompson’s tall, angular room, with scene changes introducing a note of neon, that recalls the designer’s similar work on Art. The play itself reminded me of Yasmina Reza’s three-hander, too, with the cosy domesticity of the setting once again being dramatically challenged, though this time with far more sinister, and less successful, results.

– Mark Shenton