'Life Support'
AldwychTheatre (WE).There could hardly be a
more unusual way of trying to yank your wife back from the depths
of a vegetative state than to invite your mistress to confess
at her bedside.
For JG, a fraudulent, humorous travel writer,
it is one of a series of desperate measures he takes during the
months in which his wife lies inert in a London hospital. The
bee-sting in Guadeloupe which did for her, and JG's ignorent
success in foiling the efforts of her would-be rescuer, could
have been a comic incident in one of his books if the consequences
had not been so tragic. For him, there's now the double burden:
firstly, whether he has the commitment and resourcefulness to
bring her back to a conscious life; and, secondly, if he fails,
to make the decision that it's time to call it a day.
Unexpectedly, JG is not lacking in strength.
Gradually the layers of caustic bravura are stripped away, to
reveal a man struggling to cope with his grief, his guilt and
his love for Georgina Hale's Gwen, who we only ever get to know
through the imaginary conversations he conducts in his head.
Like most of Gray's plays, this is a one
man show and Alan Bates is at his crumpled best as the raddled
old writer; a mix of helplessness and arrogance who painfully
takes a final look at Gwen before sitting down to a game of chess.
The rest of the cast are just cyphers and
it would be hard to imagine more artificial, unconvincing scenes
than those with JG's brother and his mistress. It's astonishing
that anyone could be persuaded to play them. With Harold Pinter
directing, one is inevitably reminded of 'A Kind of Alaska',
only this is a more straightforward story and certainly more
static. A hefty dose of oxygen wouldn't go amiss. Jane
Edwardes
13 August 1997
Copyright 1997 Time Out Group Ltd. All rights
reserved.
