The Talking Cure, NT Cottesloe, London
Auntie & Me, Wyndhams, London
A Little Fantasy, Soho, London
Sigi and Carl in a Viennese whirl
Sunday, 19 January 2003
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Carl Jung, his ageing mentor Sigmund Freud and young Sabina Speilrein: this is a triangular case history that just begs to be dramatised. In fact, back in 1998, some may recall Snoo Wilson's Bush Theatre play, Sabina, grappled with Jung's none-too-professional relationship with Miss Spielrein – a paternally abused patient. And now at the National, Christopher Hampton's new play The Talking Cure – with Ralph Fiennes on brilliant form as Jung – revisits that terrain and meshes a study of early psychoanalytic practises with a riveting romantic tragedy.
Carl Jung, his ageing mentor Sigmund Freud and young Sabina Speilrein: this is a triangular case history that just begs to be dramatised. In fact, back in 1998, some may recall Snoo Wilson's Bush Theatre play, Sabina, grappled with Jung's none-too-professional relationship with Miss Spielrein – a paternally abused patient. And now at the National, Christopher Hampton's new play The Talking Cure – with Ralph Fiennes on brilliant form as Jung – revisits that terrain and meshes a study of early psychoanalytic practises with a riveting romantic tragedy.
Jodhi May's pale, quivering Sabina starts off, in 1904, as a severely screwed-up Russian Jewish teenager. She's been dumped by her sadistically domineering papa in Zürich's Bughölzi asylum. Thus she becomes Jung's guinea pig as he keenly tries out the new "talking cure" advocated by Freud. The latter, mentioning en route that it's good to have an Aryan join a field that's sneered at as just Jewish, hails Jung as his heir apparent.
However, Hampton suggests that Jung's encouragement of Sabina's hitherto frustrated medical ambitions may be the therapeutic key, when he takes her on as his assistant. She progresses to become a pioneering psychiatrist in her own right. Dominic Rowan's Freud indeed declares that her thesis about love involving self-annihilation has caused him to reassess sex and death.
Meanwhile, Jung has privately surrendered to his impulses. Encouraged by a wild neurotic-turned-colleague called Otto Gross, we see him conducting an extramarital affair with Sabina. Then, after repressing and publicly denying his passion for her, he teeters on the brink of mental breakdown. Sabina is entwined with the increasing conflicts between the "sire" of psychoanalysis and his Swiss protégé, for Jung is clearly stung when she transfers to Freud's couch in Vienna.
Hampton's running themes of father-figures and power inversions may be too obvious at points. His charting of Jung's changing theories can seem sketchy and, as dramatis personae Mrs Jung and Otto are underdeveloped. One might also wonder if The Talking Cure has half a mind to be a screenplay, some scenes are so brief.
Yet these are cavils. Tim Hatley's set is fluid, surprising and intimate – turning the Cottesloe sideways on and using sliding iron shutters to reveal bedrooms and consultation rooms on three floors. It should be noted that Hampton's storyline has great strength in its simple progress as well – with just one searing jolt at its heart, leaping forwards to the Holocaust. The broad political picture concerning anti-Semitism builds up surreptitiously from a couple of wry jokes about assumed Germanic and Christian supremacism. This playwright is always effortlessly witty as well as intelligent and poignant. Moreover, unlike most shrink plays, The Talking Cure leaves its audience with analytic detective work to do.
Directed by Howard Davies, the acting is fascinatingly detailed, with the exception of one coyly stylised sex scene. Fiennes's Jung is surprisingly warm and richly ambivalent, with a naughty antiauthoritarian twinkle behind his prim spectacles. His slide from clinical interest in Sabina to sympathy to ardour is also extraordinarily subtle. Rowan (taking over from James Hazeldine who sadly died last month) wisely underplays Freud's patronising streak. His doubling as Otto is thought-provoking too, for he seems like a tempting, wicked "id" sent by Freud to Jung. Meanwhile May's stuttering hysteria – panting like a captured bird – manages to be acutely vulnerable with an underlying ferocity that will later mature into inner strength.
By contrast, the trouble with Auntie & Me – an excruciatingly lame star-vehicle for comic Alan Davies – is that playwright Morris Panych doesn't stretch to any talking at all. Or rather this is a two-hander that drags on for around an hour and a half without developing beyond a feeble monologue.
At lights-up, you might think you're going to be treated to some sinister, early Pinter play. Davies' Kemp, a young man in a tie with a suitcase in his hand, appears in a shabby flat, standing over the bed of a silent and apparently dying elderly woman – Margaret Tyzack's Grace. Gradually, however, you realise that Davies is just going to churn out a bunch of farcically insensitive one-liners, busily planning auntie's funeral and occasionally digressing to misanthropically curse small kids in the street.
His character hardly hangs together, with a quip about postmodernism, for example, sounding suspiciously like an authorial diary note, not the words of a bank clerk. I would have read the programme to relieve the chronic tediousness of this show, only Panych's scenes are so bitty there's a yawning blackout every few seconds. OK, there are one or two explosively hilarious jokes and one great plot twist. But the belated shift towards love and understanding is pitifully contrived. In any case, Davies is a dull, self-conscious actor – with disappointingly little of the charming brio he has as a stand-up comic. Director Anna Mackmin can't cure that problem, and poor old Tyzack has nothing to do but pull vaguely quizzical faces and bite her lip.
For a long stretch, A Little Fantasy doesn't look as if it's going anywhere much either. Yet the physical theatre troupe, Told By An Idiot, always have something inspired up their sleeve. Directed by Paul Hunter, this is a company-devised adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's mid-20th century short stories, set in America. It is a comical portrait of romantic fantasies going up the spout, with cranky strangers and Bible Belt smalltimers crossing paths in a movie house and a bowling alley. There's a faint whiff of "Bisto kid" cuteness about some of the cast and the early mimed farmyard scenes look like Complicite shows from 10 or 15 years back.
But Naomi Wilkinson's set of raked pews and trapdoors transmutes into roof tops, biplanes and a stormy ocean quite magically. Hayley Carmichael and Lisa Hammond also move in the closing scenes, as they dive under the waves to a grief-stricken yet ecstatic world of free-flowing dreams. By the end, you feel as if you've seen something really extraordinary.
'The Talking Cure': NT Cottesloe, London SE1 (020 7452 3000), to 5 Feb; 'Auntie & Me': Wyndhams, London WC2 (020 7369 1736), to 26 April; 'A Little Fantasy': Soho, London W1 (020 7478 0100), to 1 Feb
