Stefan’s got a problem. He doesn’t remember the woman he slept with ten years earlier and now she’s basically his stalker. That’s the thrust of this strange, slight play by Christopher Hampton, adapted from the novella by Stefan Zweig. But despite its themes of obsession and mental illness, this is not ‘Baby Reindeer’. It’s far too arch, too stiff for that.
The original novella takes the form of a letter written by a woman to a Viennese writer. She explains her obsession with him, how it’s played out for many years, and some of the dire consequences. Hampton, who first adapted this for the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna where it was very successful, has had to fiddle with the structure and the timeline. Yes he has form with epistolary works turned into plays – ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ is his biggest hit – and he knows that someone reading out a letter on stage probably isn’t that interesting. But nor, especially, is this. First Stefan and the woman have a one night stand. She seems to know a lot about him. Then she comes back in some distress, and talks at him for ages.
The unpeeling of the mystery keeps things interesting for a while, but the dialogue stays too stilted, like it’s translated from another language (which it sort of is) and Chelsea Walker’s production feels all cold and alienating, with a permeating bleakness that stops us from finding any heart, or any way of feeling for the characters.
Rosanna Vize’s set looks cold and ghostly. The flat is grey, full of hard surfaces. It’s set within an even bigger, even greyer space where dead roses have accumulated - one of the play’s most prominent motifs. There are a few little touches to try and make a very untheatrical piece theatrical, like having a third character (Jessie Gattward) haunt the stage, a younger version of the unknown woman, who moves like a dancer.
In fact, Natalie Simpson’s performance as the woman is weirdly dance-like. All her hand gestures seem very choreographed, very precise and rote, which prevents it from being entirely convincing. Fair play to James Corrigan as Stefan, he had to step in last minute and learn the role in a week after a cancelled press night and quick recasting. But Walker directs them to a place of stiffness that acts like an ice barrier between the world of the play and us.
More fundamentally, it never becomes clear why Hampton has chosen to adapt this story, and why we’re watching it now on this stage. He’s had to rework the bones of it, shifting the chronology, and there’s an inelegance to that new structure, a forced fitting to make it work on stage, that diminishes it.
And what’s the relevance? At a stretch you could argue something about stalkers or obsession. There’s a sadness in the fact that the woman is tossed around in a patriarchal society. Hampton has pulled the period forward, so it’s set in the thirties rather than the twenties. The fact that the protagonist is Jewish suddenly means there’s an implicit danger, a creeping terror that Hampton makes reference to a couple of times. But that’s it. Just a couple of mentions. Nothing plot-critical, nothing more than nods. It feels inconsequential to the character and to the piece. An awkward play, then, and a cold production, which never quite manages to justify itself.