Theatre is a contract between its creators and its audience that something will be delivered, in real time by one to the other, that involves skill and purpose and has a beginning, a middle and an end. It is not part of the deal that a different performer is landed on stage each night with no clue as to what they will be expected to do. Yet 15 distinguished actors including Fiona Shaw, Toby Jones and Sheila Atim have signed up to perform Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen), a multimedia meditation on the lot of the international emigrant by the Iranian dramatist Nassim Soleimanpour.
This isn’t improvisation. Apart from a few minutes of introductory banter between the playwright on video link and the actor alone on the main stage of the Royal Court, everything is scripted and relayed to the performer either through an earpiece or in typescript that flashes up on one of three large screens.
Adrian Lester, the hero who volunteered for press night, at first cuts a nail-bitingly tentative figure, as a disembodied voice orders him to don white socks and sandals in order to inhabit a replica of the playwright’s own Berlin study, complete with an heirloom Persian carpet. Gradually, Lester does indeed come to inhabit the role of onlooker to, and mouthpiece for, the tumultuous history that has swept Soleimanpour from his native Iran.
The show is a commission fromthe London international festival of theatre (LIFT) as part of a mission to develop an international theatre minimally dependent on carbon miles. It is directed by the rising star Omar Elerian, who in 2022 took Complicité’s Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni on a revelatory exploration of Ionesco’s The Chairs, and whose manifesto is “I make theatre, mainly about theatre-making”. The lighting, sound and production design are works of art in their own right.
Given that Soleimanpour is, at his own insistence, not a refugee but the possessor of two passports that he interchanges to visit his family back home, his story – which sweeps from the political protests of Tehran to meditations on carpet design and deep time and space – teeters of the brink of pretentious self-indulgence. But the staging is the thing, culminating in a magical sequence when past and present, the here and the there, converge on a single screen. It is wonderful to get this glimpse into the future of theatre on the stage that once hosted the brave new worlds of John Osborne and Caryl Churchill.
In a sense, Echo is a techno-futuristic improvisation on the theme of epistolary fiction: a letter from the playwright. Hampstead theatre is hosting a more conventional example, with Visit from an Unknown Woman, adapted by Christopher Hampton from a short story by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.
Back in the mid-1980s, Hampton wrote the hit RSC adaptation of an earlier epistolary work, Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses. There is a similar air of crazed eroticism to this 1922 yarn, which recounts the obsessive love of a young woman for a philandering writer who is oblivious as to why, and from whom, he receives a bunch of white roses on every birthday.
In the era of #MeToo and terrifying stalking scandals, it is an uncomfortable vehicle, which enacts a successful male writer’s fantasy about a young woman’s fantasy about a successful male writer. But uncomfortable is good, if handled as deftly and suggestively as in Chelsea Walker’s chamber production. Designer Rosanna Vize places a tight, bright apartment interior in a dark wasteland where Marianne’s younger self dances around a heap of rotting roses.
The key is in the balance between the two main characters. Even though the writer, Stefan, is required to remain largely passive, as the febrile Marianne unspools her story, it is a concentrated passivity, which gives momentum to her narration by moving from ignorance to incredulity and finally to horror. Taking over the role at short notice, James Corrigan does well in creating a character whose self-absorption is not simply alienating. He is helped by some judicious updating by Hampton, who places him as a Jewish writer in pre-second world war Vienna, struggling to hold on to privileges that include the right to publish, and a discreetly devoted valet (Nigel Hastings).
But the centre is held by Natalie Simpson in a performance of powerfully constrained passion. Though her Marianne repeatedly assures Stefan that she has no regrets and casts no blame, her hands tell a more desperate and beseeching story, fluttering like bright trapped birds against her black dress.
Unrequited love also lies at the heart of Joseph Stein and Stephen Schwartz’s 1980s musical The Baker’s Wife, which gets the sort of full-throttle revival that London’s Menier Chocolate Factory is famous for, without ever quite justifying itself. Based on a film by Marcel Pagnol, this is the story of an elderly baker and his young wife, who bring bread, glamour and scandal to a French backwater, thus repairing ancient enmities and restoring its joie de vivre.
The scenario is a village square, and Paul Farnsworth’s clever design places most of the set behind the audience, drawing us into the centre of the community where the locals drink, bicker and play boules, gathering into a single rushing entity at any hint of news or scandal. The story belongs to them as much as to the baker and his wife.
Gordon Greenberg’s production steers a straight path through the cheesy lyrics and cutesy French stereotypes. There is just one knowing wink, when a Juliet balcony detaches from the bakery and trundles into the middle of the stage, underlining the fact that Meadowlark, the song of submission that the baker’s wife is singing at the time, is the show’s single break-out number. This does no favours to Lucie Jones, who is quite capable of making the point herself. She is a radiant foil to both Clive Rowe’s endearing baker and to Joachim Pedro Valdes, as a seducer whose virility pours forth the few times he gets a chance to sing. There is no faulting the ensemble, who surge in and out of focus in tableaux of marital dispute, moral outrage or rural idiocy. But this is a museum piece that doesn’t really deserve a place in a museum.
Star ratings (out of five)
Echo ★★★
Visit From an Unknown Woman ★★★
The Baker’s Wife ★★★
Echo is at the Royal Court, London, until 27 July
Visit from an Unknown Woman is at Hampstead theatre, London, until 27 July
The Baker’s Wife is at Menier Chocolate Factory, London, until 14 September
