David Newby’s latest play, Love Conquers All, is a heady mix of intellectually witty and emotionally draining drama.
The mind, language, the body and the soul are each represented by the four figures: Louisa, a tv psycho-analyst and her husband Matthew, an academic linguist, invite the tv participants Hillary, a surgeon, and her husband Peter, a man of the church, for a weekend at their boathouse.
Boathouse? A scenario for mystery and murder, as in Rebecca?
Mystery, certainly. All four characters play verbal and psychiatric games and imbibe cocktails (secret potions?) non-stop. This opens up channels for ghosts from the past to surface – and split the married couples.
The Preface to the play, from the Introduction to Alice in Wonderland, reads: “All in the golden afternoon/ Full leisurely we glide;/ For both our oars, with little skill,/ By little arms are plied,/ While littler hands make vain pretence/ Our wanderings to guide.”
But this is no easy-going ‘merrily, merrily we row our boat, gently down the stream.’ We are lulled into a false sense of security. The pull of the sea and the view of an idyllic island (real or illusory?) form the backdrop to the claustrophobic microscosm of the boathouse: the waves smash around the pillars of the boathouse, sea mists shroud the island and the diving arctic terns are kamikazes. Threat and foreboding are present: storm clouds are on the horizon and in the garden grow poisonous herbs such as Belladonna. We are entering uncharted, treacherous waters.
The mood darkens in the second part. Two years later the four meet up again. Louisa’s tv programme has been reduced to a radio slot; they are reduced to ‘getting comatose’ on cocktails. They resort to Agatha Christie scenarios and Cartesian discussions about the meaning of life. They play a psychiatrist’s game with a twist: “If you were a human being, who would you be?” Matthew quotes the March Hare telling Alice: “You should say what you mean!”
The last act takes place, after the boat trip, on the island. They are marooned. Louisa has brought a huge jug of cocktail with them, which they pass round ritually, as a ‘common chalice’. All four are at a decisive stage in their lives.
“We’ll cross our bridges when we come to them.”
“Have we not crossed them?”
“Have we not burnt them?”
They end up reading not from the Bible, but from Alice in Wonderland: “The moment you tell a story it becomes true. By virtue of its having been told.” Such stories become real for our characters.
In Love Conquers All Newby plays brilliantly with ideas and language, rather like Stoppard. Universal truths are upended, clichés are revalued and idiomatic sayings are inverted: ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’, for example, plays with the further idea of telling untruths. The canine metaphor is also there when his wife Louisa says Matthew is a pisser, not a biter. His linguistics are toothless.
This ‘comic tragedy’ (rather than a tragi-comedy) may well owe a debt to Pinter, but the growing darkness while grim games are enacted reminded me more of Beckett in Endgame.
Remo Nitschke captures convincingly the ‘pisser’ side of Matthew, rather than the ‘biter’. David Leersch, playing the obsessive Bible-quoting vicar, delights with his pointed mannerisms. Lisa Rohrer as Louisa and Cecilia Servatius as Hillary both have poise, a natural sense of pausing and real presence on stage. These qualities come out especially in the scene where Hillary tells Louisa in highly formal language how to examine her mammary glands; Louisa responds by rhapsodizing about the erotic appeal of her luxuriant breasts. The clash in stylistic register and tone is a joy to experience!
The staging is closely observed and subtle, with the melting Dali clock offering a surrealist touch to the notion of time passing. The set is flexible, with the bookcase becoming the raised beach in the last act. The lighting reflects neatly the darker movement of the whole play; the opening tv video is arresting and cleverly integrated. Resourceful theatre management, this.
This production does full justice to David Newby’s inventive script. Sly humour gives way to darkest irony. This is a play to ponder, to savour – in, short, to really experience. Well worth seeing.
by Andrew Milne-Skinner
The Pennyless Players 