Wife

by Samuel Adamson

seen at the Kiln Theatre on 26 June 2019

Indhu Rubasingham directs Richard Cant, Karen Fishwick, Pamela Hardman, Joshua James, Calam Lynch and Sirine Saba in this inventive and intriguing family saga starting in 1959 and looking forward to 2039.

But 'family saga' is only part of it. The play opens with perhaps the most notorious slammed door in theatre history, marking the departure of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House, being performed in 1959. We see glimpses of other performances of this play at crucial moments in the story in 1988, 2019, and another generation later; the challenge Nora poses as she insists on personal autonomy at the expense of conventional marriage, and even of motherhood, is the central concern of Wife, and it's fairly clear that there is still no satisfactory accommodation between the demands of self-fulfillment and the compromises needed to survive a relationship.

In 1959, Daisy (Karen Fishwick) does not slam the door on her husband Robert (Joshua James), but instead turns her back on the glamorous actress Suzannah (Sirine Saba) whom they have just seen play Nora. The deadening consequences of this concession to society's mores can be seen in the queasy mixture of camp outrage and self-loathing expressed by their son Ivar (Joshua James) in 1988 as he flaunts his gay sensibility and at the same time patronises his young lover Eric (Calam Lynch). Ivar, completely obsessed with the drama of his own painful development, cannot imagine that Daisy is anything other than a monster, even though Eric has another view. 

But by 2019 Ivar (now Richard Cant) is married to Cas (Calam Lynch again), the temperamental star of a cross-gendered Doll's House, and when the older man meets a young straight couple it is clear that Nora's challenge is being made to him, rather than by him, as he seems to acquiesce in Cas's awful control of his life. Clare (Karen Fishwick), it transpires, is Eric's daughter, and he, only late out of the closet, has been shot dead in a Pride march in Melbourne. She is perhaps looking for 'closure', but it is a remarkable feature of this play that misunderstandings and the complete impossibility of bending others to one's own view of the world triumph over neat reconciliations and easy emotional fixes. Ivar cannot provide any real solace to Clare, and indeed berates her in turn for contemplating marriage to the over-accommodating Finn.

However, it seems that they did marry, since a generation later their daughter Daisy (Karen Fishwick again) is the star-struck usherette at a new production of A Doll's House, and a scene knowingly reminiscent of All About Eve is played out with the latest Suzannah. But the new Daisy isn't planning to supplant the new Suzannah; she has a memento accidentally passed on from the first Daisy through Eric and Clare to herself, with which the two women attempt to imagine the story of 1959. We know that they are hopelessly wrong, the final example of the unlikelihood of one generation really knowing the lives of its forebears.

I see I've given more plot details than usual in this account, but it is really difficult to discuss this sort of play in other than plot-driven terms. The cast manage the generational shifts really well, particularly when playing descendants of earlier characters, but also - as in the case of Calam Lynch - when playing completely unrelated and very different people. The design by Richard Kent cleverly combines theatrical settings - footlights and old-fashioned stage curtains - with dressing rooms, a bar, a neutral meeting space, and even a garden party. The themes raised so controversially by Ibsen are shown to be relevant in all the periods examined by this play, often in unexpected ways as new social conventions exert their own deadening effect on people not fitted to them. The theme of misunderstanding adds a peculiar poignancy to our appreciation of the characters. It's a powerful dramatic idea used also to great effect in A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, in Michael Cunningham's 

The Hours and its film adaptation, and in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia. But although we know better as an audience, it is perhaps also salutary to be reminded that in our own lives we may be as misguided as the characters whose gropings after truth we are witnessing.