When the Night Begins
Teletext 12th
March 2004
This is the best
play this theatre has had all year. Which is not saying much.
Hanif Kureishi,
while a very experienced playwright, is best known for his screenplays, most notable
‘My Beautiful Launderette’. But back in the 70s and 80s, he was
writer-in-residence at the Royal Court Theatre when two-character pot-boilers
were the latest thing.
So while well-made
and carefully crafted across its 80 no-interval minutes, this is actually an
old-fashioned play about two ordinary people with a secret that will,
inevitably lead to violence.
It starts with a
middle-aged man and a young woman talking in a shabby flat. Jane is nervous,
furious, unable to come to the point. She wants something of Cecil but we don’t
know what.
Despite the social
differences – he is defiantly working class, a retired bus driver. She sounds
upper middle-class and is elegantly, expensively dressed – they clearly share a
past.
Jane was his
step-daughter, it turns out, but they have not seen each other in many years.
In the interim she has married a famous film director, had a daughter, and been
left a widow.
She considers
herself to have been so damaged by their relationship that she has come to kill
him. Once this is established, the rest of the play is the unfolding of their
stories, shared and separate.
Catherine
McCormack, who was terrific in the National Theatre’s recent ‘All My Sons’,
here takes on the unhappy Jane with an intensity and banked fury that is truly
scary.
Michael Pennington,
that fine actor, is here cast against type, far from the elegant classicist we
know.
But neither the
acting, or production are the problem here. The problem is I didn’t believe
Kureishi’s situation. I didn’t believe that this man and woman would have found
themselves in this flat, having this conversation.
And that problem is
too big to solve.
Evening Standard,
12th March 2004, Nicholas de Jongh
‘When the Night Begins’
is my idea of a theatrical nightmare. You sit trapped in the auditorium for 90
minutes without an interval. You are required to watch two highly talented
actors, Catherine McCormack and Michael Pennington, valiantly and vainly trying
to breathe a little life into a psychological thriller by Hanif Kureishi that
has no more dramatic vitality than a beached whale and never thrills. When the
handsome McCormack, as the rich, emotionally disturbed young widow Jane, draws
a huge knife from her handbag and holds it inches away from Michael Pennington,
who plays a retired bus driver unbelievably called Cecil, the tension rises
just a couple of degrees on the theatrical barometer to lukewarm.
Kureishi, famous
for his novel ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ and his films ‘My Beautiful Launderette’
and ‘The Mother’, is an uneven playwright, whose last play, ‘Sleep With Me’,
was abused by almost every critic apart from me. On this occasion, though, his
work leaves me cold. ‘When the Night Begins’ sporadically attempts to grapple
with the enduring psychological problems caused by sexual abuse of the
adolescent. The play simply allows two small, narrow streams of consciousness
to flow with sluggish, slow abandon across the stage and back again – and
again. These two streams, representing the abuser and the abused, never really
meet or connect. There is no serious conflict or engagement between Jane and
Cecil, who long ago became her substitute father, her sexual abuser and her
hippy mother’s lover.
The past does, of
course, rear its ugly, damaged head but only just an inch or so. The scene is
Cecil’s Streatham council flat into which McCormack’s compelling Jane, who
shimmers with nerves, suppressed rage and vulnerability, arrives with murder
ostensibly in mind and that knife at the ready. There is, though, the faint,
persisting impression that the emotional ties between the abuser and the abused
have never quite been broken. Before anything violent is contemplated Jane
treats us to a lengthy voyage down her memory lane, while Cecil acts as her
helpful stooge. “Brilliant man. Lived a fulfilled life,” he says of her now
dead husband, the famous film director. “What was he, 18 years older than you?
Remind me how you got to know him… What did Bernard leave you?”
This artificial method
of providing us with boring, mainly irrelevant information is the play’s
governing characteristic. The fashion in which both Jane and Cecil tell stories
about their lives serves to prevent the clash and clamour of recrimination.
Jane, all baleful in funereal black, keeps reminiscing about herself in the
self-absorbed style of the practising narcissist. Since she is a successful
artist, has been reunited with her mother and begun a new relationship, the
influence that her life has been ruined by Cecil’s exploitative sexual abuse
rings untrue. There is, though, insufficient evidence for us to judge.
Kureishi’s dialogue
veers between the odd, affected and pseudo-poetic. Both the versatile actors,
in Anthony Clark’s sensitive production, deftly bear the heavy burden of
Kureishi’s style and an unresolved, plot-lite narrative. Michael Pennington, at
his most impressive, lends Cecil an interesting air of guile, evasiveness and
self-confidence, thereby effortlessly seizing the upper hand from the unhappy
Jane. But not even such committed acting can life-save an ever-sinking play.
The Guardian, 12th
March 2004, Michael Billington
I wish this
struggling new theatre well, but its capacity to discover mediocre plays by
good writers continues with this manipulative thriller by Hanif Kureishi that
touches on serious issues while titillating us with the prospect of sex and
violence.
Kureishi presents
us with an odd, seemingly disparate couple: rough working-class Cecil, and
edgy, well-groomed Jane. As he welcomes her into his Streatham flat, we learn
that he is a communist and former bus driver. She is the rich widow of a famous
film director.
But the real
connection is that Jane is Cecil’s stepdaughter and has come to avenge herself
for the sexual abuse she suffered as a teenager. What follows is an 80-minute
cat and mouse game in which she threatens her stepfather with a knife while he
tries to examine the reality of their relationship.
Clearly, Kureishi
is suggesting that memory is highly subjective. Jane recalls only cruelty and
exploitation, while Cecil implies that the sex was consensual and that the
relationship enriching.
But, instead of
exploring conflicting recollections, Kureishi resorts to the melodramatic
techniques of a 1980s American play entitled ‘Extremities’, in which a rape
victim turned the tables on her attacker. We are kept on edge, not by the
argument but by the question of whether Cecil will get hold of the knife or
Jane will succumb to his sexual blandishments.
In the process,
Kureishi plays fast and loose with probability. Why, for instance, did Cecil’s
wife so stoically accept the news of his liaison with her daughter?
There is also a
good deal of confusion as to whether it is better to exorcise or exercise one’s
memories. At one point Cecil tells his stepdaughter “there’s no future in the
past”, and at another that “the past is your capital”, which seems a strange
sentiment coming from a Marxist bus driver.
The result is an
evening of unproductive tension in which two excellent actors, in Anthony
Clark’s production, prowl warily around each other. Cast against type as the
brawny prowl, Michael Pennington convinces you that Cecil is both the victim of
romantic fixation and capable of physical cruelty.
Catherine McCormack
also combines a righteous desire for retribution with a febrile emotional
instability. However, the play works pruriently on our base appetites without
offering anything in the way of psychological illumination.
What’s on Stage, 12th
March 2004, Teri Paddock
Writer Hanif
Kureishi found early success with amusingly poignant and politicised
rites-of-passage tales – such as ‘The Buddha of Suburbia’ and ‘My Beautiful
Launderette’ – which were at the dramatic vanguard of portraying the modern
Anglo-Asian experience.
In more recent
years, Kureishi has fallen from favour as his work has taken a more apparently
self-indulgent turn. The backlash upon publication of his auto-biographical
novella ‘Intimacy’, in which he clinically detailed his plans to abandon his
wife and two children, was savage. Soon after, that was nearly matched by the
critical opprobrium heaped on his first play in 15 years, 1999’s ‘Sleep With Me’,
which covered similar ground.
Five years on,
Kureishi is back at Hampstead Theatre for the first time since 1983’s ‘Birds of
Passage’ with another play which, while thankfully there’s no philandering
writer in the lead, remains focused on the infidelities and betrayals hidden in
urban households.
Thirty-something
Jane (a sleek Catherine McCormack), whose much older big-wig film director
husband (oops, there’s the glitterati link) has recently died, has come back to
the south London high-rise – mildewed walls, curling wallpaper, dusty blinds
and garish carpet designed by Patrick Connellan – of her childhood to confront
her would-be stepfather, now in his late sixties. Years of therapy have failed
to alleviate the pain of sexual abuse at the hands of Cecil (a chirpy but
changeable Michael Pennington) so she’s devised a more radical solution to cut
the memory of him out of her life.
‘When the Night
Begins’ is billed as a psychological thriller in which the lines between victim
and aggressor are blurred, but in Anthony Clark’s premiere production, the
tension never ratchets up quite enough for real thrills. There’s come waving of
a butcher’s knife and a blade, a few tussles, and a strange moment when Pennington’s
Cecil perches on a chair, but as torture and torment goes, it’s all pretty tame
stuff.
However, something
interesting is happening – or at least, has happened – between these two. With their
differing versions of the past and their wary dance of repulsion and
attraction, you are left questioning just who has wronged who worse. It’s
clearly a complicated relationship and yet, again, unsatisfyingly so, because
one of the most interesting complicating factors – Esther, Jane’s mother and
Cecil’s long-term lover, now dying of cancer – is never thrown fully into the
mix.
Both talk about her
a lot – how much did she know? where does her love and loyalty lie? how did her
bohemian lifestyle impact their lives? – but, though she’s at the door and on
the phone, always close, she never appears. More’s the pity. I can’t help but
think how much more effective this slight two-hander might have worked as a
three-hander, with meatier confrontation, subtler revelations and greater
dramatic tension all round.
British Theatre
Guide, 12th March 2004, Philip Fisher
The two characters
in ‘When the Night Begins’ could not apparently be more of a contrast. Jane oozes
glamour as she enters the too seedy apartment looking like a 1960s Italian film
star with dark glasses and high, black stilettos.
Her host, Cecil, is
a retired bus driver and trade unionist with communist leanings. It takes time
to understand what they have in common but, almost inevitably, it turns out to
be the fashionable subject of child abuse that powers this play.
Cecil moved in with
the family when Jane was a teenager and her younger brother. While he has happy
memories of this time, Jane who has now become rich as a result of a marriage
to an older man finds it the stuff of nightmares.
For 90 minutes, the
pair discuss issues around this subject and try to apportion blame. Cecil’s
somewhat unconvincing view is that Jane was flirting with him and only too keen
to get into his bed. The way that she sees it, he was a monster preying on and
attacking little children.
The pair veer
between reasonable understanding and violent abuse in an overly controlled way.
This means that the production delivers a combination of political and social
debate, and unreasoning anger without real explanation in the characters of the
deeply unhappy couple for the switches between the two.
‘When the Night
Begins’ suffers from Hanif Kureishi’s overly loud authorial voice. For much of
the time, the characters seem to be no more than ciphers for his views, whether
on capitalism or the relationship between the sexes.
Director Anthony
Clark has been lucky to secure the services of two fine actors, Michael Pennington
and Catherine McCormack, for this play. Despite their best efforts, it never
manages to engage with its audience and while some of the areas that it
investigates are interesting, it feels more like a short story than a
theatrical event.
The Times, 13th
March 2004, Sam Marlowe
In his controversial
1999 novel ‘Intimacy’, Hanif Kureishi gave a cool, and perhaps cruel, account
of his desertion of his wife and two children. In this new two-hander play, the
writer again explores emotionally brutal territory. But while ‘When the Night
Begins’ sometimes exerts a grim fascination, it’s difficult to see quite what
the point is.
The action takes
place in the high-rise flat of Cecil, a retired London bus driver. This
desolate place, designed by Patrick Connellan with swirling carpets and
stained, peeling wallpaper, is the ugly arena for an uglier confrontation
between Cecil and Jane, his estranged stepdaughter.
Jane’s film-maker
husband has recently died and, in the process of taking stock of her life, she
has found herself invaded by memories of the physical and sexual abuse Cecil
inflicted on her when she was a child. With a mind full of pain and a kitchen
knife in her bag, she is set on revenge.
Predictably, Cecil
doesn’t see the past in quite the same way. He doesn’t deny that he had sex
with Jane but believes that what they had was a consensual love affair. And now
he is not only put out that she has neglected him until tonight but is also
violently envious of her wealth, social status and talents.
Anthony Clark’s
taut production is extremely well acted by Michael Pennington and Catherine
McCormack. One moment cracking a double-edged joke, the next dropping his voice
to a sneer of undisguised aggression and disgust, Pennington’s Cecil is a
loathsome manipulator who still has the power to confuse his stepdaughter be
recalling some moments of genuine tenderness they once shared. And McCormack,
chic in expensive funereal black, is all angles and agony, her elbows jutting
out sharply and her hands shaking as she feverishly paces to and fro. It’s horrible,
as the play progresses, to watch her brought to her knees. Kureishi seems to be
suggesting that all memories are subjective and fallible, and that any attempt
to heal emotional wounds through vengeance is doomed to failure.
He’s probably right
on both counts. But that doesn’t make some of the play’s scenes – in particular,
the spectacle of an intelligent, lovely young woman forced by her unrepentant
abuser to grovel on the floor in terror and misery – any more meaningful.
Without meaning,
such a moment feels faintly pornographic. It certainly requires far better
justification that ‘When the Night Begins’ is ever able to offer.
Metro, 15th
March 2004, Patrick Marmion
Hanif Kureishi’s
latest play pitches a thirty-something woman against her sixty-something
stepfather with bitter accusations of child abuse.
The stepdad
(Michael Pennington) is a former cockney communist turned wino, and the woman
(Catherine McCormack) is a dilettante artist now married to a wealthy film
director.
As the title
suggests, the action is a dark night of the soul that encompasses as much
council flat realism as it does theatrical melodrama.
The idea is an
attempt to resolve the question of whether the sins of the past are a resource
or a burden; the two characters take turns to offload with all the acidic wit
one associates with Kureishi. The trouble is, it’s not always clear what
exactly the stepfather is meant to have done to the woman.
Although it’s
partly Kureishi’s intention to create moral grey areas, what is resolved and
unresolved by the end is a complete mystery.
Instead, it’s down
to Anthony Clark’s production to whip up lots of atmosphere, aided by Patrick
Connellan’s design which contributes a rather dog-eared study of interior
neglect.
Even if the play
never draws you in, the acting is generally good to watch.
The Guardian, 15th
March 2004, Rhoda Koenig
There sure is a lot
of acting in ‘When the Night Begins’. As Cecil, an ailing, hard-drinking
retired bus driver, Michael Pennington impersonates with great authenticity a
bloke who has cleared nearly all the hurdles life has set him in its decency
test. Having taken up, 30 years earlier, with a loving but spaced-out woman, he
now looks after her while her body is eaten away by cancer, though they no
longer live together.
Pennington works a
bit hard to establish the character – choppy gestures, clenched face – but from
then on it is impressive to watch him convey Cecil’s stratagems and moods. He pleads,
comforts, flatters, shrivels, terrorises, denounces. You would, too, if you
were visited by a crazy woman with a knife.
Jane, the daughter
of Cecil’s lover, has not seen him for a dozen years. She is the recent widow
of a film-maker who left her millions: she has a boyfriend and a daughter she
loves, and her paintings are going on show. Yet none of this makes her happy. Cecil,
she has decided, is the fly in her ointment, and she is determined to extract
confession, contrition and perhaps blood – though, as the play goes on, the knife
seems a mere prop in Jane’s private drama.
The beautiful
Catherine McCormack, while not terribly convincing as a former council-estate
wild child, is adept at portraying the vagaries of a woman by turns tormented,
wistful, nasty and prophetic: “I learnt [in church] that, for the wrong that
people do, there will be a weighing hour – and that is tonight.”
But, in spite of
the tension, Hanif Kureishi’s two-hander turns into an exhibition of acting for
its own sake, as pointless and depersonalised as any workshop exercise. Jane keeps
scratching away at Cecil for some event or feeling that does not seem to exist.
He cuddled her, but there was no rape – indeed she, competing with her mother
and wanting affection, came on to him.
He did beat her
with a belt, but her was a simple man trying to keep order in a chaotic house. He
reminds her that he came home one day with a guitar that began her career as a
musician and led her to bagging a millionaire. There’s some pass-the-parcel
business with the knife that shifts the threat around, but it feels as stagey
as the dialogue.
In the end, Anthony
Clark’s production seems less like a play than a slick brief for the defence. Nearly
everything we learn about Cecil adds to his intelligence, decency and
masculinity. All we hear about Jane confirms she is spoilt, selfish, lazy and
angry at all men because none of them is her ideal daddy. Not only are the
preening and self-pity morally distasteful – they kill the chance of any real
love or real life taking place before our eyes.
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