The Bay at Nice

by David Hare

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 13 April 2019

Richard Eyre directs Penelope Wilton as Valentina Nrovka, Ophelia Lovibond as her daughter Sophia, David Rintoul as Sophia's lover Peter and Martin Hutson as an assistant curator at the Hermitage in this play about authenticating a possible Matisse painting left to the museum by an emigre aristocrat, entwined with the difficult relationship between mother and daughter.

The situation is rather artificial, Sophia having thought that the occasion of her mother's invitation to the museum to see the painting might be the occasion for announcing her intention to leave her husband and children and live with the much older and widowed Peter, for which she needs funds for the divorce proceedings. This allows us to see Valentina from a number of different angles - impatient with museums, dismissive of much modern art, contemptuous of modern ideas of freedom and self-fulfilment, and therefore extremely abrasive with her daughter. Behind this steely exterior, expressed in well-turned speeches of frightening social and moral put-downs (rather like Lady Bracknell in deadly earnest) is a history of repressed anguish and unacknowledged disappointment - Valentina was a gay young thing in Paris, a model and possibly lover of Matisse, shut out by the Master's admission that he had no time for love, and determined, with a baby to look after, to return to Russia to give order and structure to her life no matter the cost.

Sophia argues against her own fate if she stays with her husband, a Party member, and claims the right to a measure of happiness and a feeling of self-worth; her mother lambasts her for her delusionary belief in such things, and her willingness to damage her husband's reputation in the Party and her children's security for the sake of a passion that she is sure will expire once furtive meetings are replaced by a new grim domesticity. She is extremely caustic when Peter presents himself, but warms to him when she sees that she can have a fruitful discussion about art with him - though it turns out to be more of a lecture than a discussion, leaving the ineffectual man with the unenviable task of looking interested on stage while the masterful Penelope Wilton holds the floor. 

Like many of David Hare's plays, the situation is promising but the execution requires a good deal of speechifying; the assistant curator is belittled; the daughter is belittled; the suitor is belittled; Valentina is in deep distress at times but covers it with acerbity and unpleasantness while demolishing the self-indulgence she sees all around her. The supporting cast do what they can - Ophelia Lovibond in particular gives a fine performance of a passionate daughter dealing with a domineering and over-articulate mother - but the play belongs to Penelope Wilton whose finely judged indications of fervour and pain show us the deep contradictions which inform Valentina's position.