Enlightenment

Shelagh Stephenson’s play at Hampstead Theatre, which also saw her Experiment with an Air Pump and Memory of Water, has just opened and I saw it last night. I like Shelagh’s work; she’s ambitious, serious, thoughtful and daring. She thinks big; she thinks about the world we’re in and tries to tell new stories. This play had its first (?) showing at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin five years ago and London’s only getting it now.

In Enlightenment, a young man, travelling on his gap year, has gone missing and his parents have endured six painful months with no idea what has happened to him. Horrifyingly, he disappeared around the time of a terrorist attack on a tourist bar. When, out of the blue, they received a phonecall from a British consulate in the far East, they rush to meet him from the airport. But that boy who greets them as mum and dad is unknown to them. Who is this amnesiac boy? They uncertainly take him into their lives but it seems he is playing games with them, cruelly toying with their feelings, while working out his own self-destructive pathology. Through the final violent confrontation between this boy and the mother, the couple seem finally to begin to move on.

The play is generous in its thought and feeling. It’s about grief, but it’s also about global travel, the ‘clash of civilisations’, the way people exploit one another, reason vs. superstition, private lives lived in the public eye, the complex motives that lay hidden in the slightest transaction. The end of the first act is a nicely plotted twist and the complications of the second pull you into the story.

For all that, I found it oddly hard to engage with. I think the main thing is that the ideas were right on the surface of the play. When people thought things, they said them. This meant that the scenes and characters didn’t seem to have much depth or complexity; there was no subtext to keep us tugging along. True, there’s a bit more in the second half where we’re kept guessing about the boy’s motives, but actually I sensed - correctly as it turned out - that we weren’t ever going to know quite why the boy was acting the way he was, so even then I wasn’t prepared to get stuck into the mystery. (The boy says a number of horrible things to them - none of which appeared particularly true: when he claims to have fucked their son, they flinch and he goes into a rant about their liberalism not allowing them to picture the homosexual act. I don’t particularly relish thinking about my parents having sex; doesn’t mean I am secretly disgusted with heterosexuality. He also cuts himself, which felt, if I’m honest, more about a strong visual image than anything lucid about the kid’s problems or motives.) At one point, Joyce says ‘It’s an English thing. Never say what you mean’ and I found myself wishing that was more of that English thing here.

In addition, the language was rather dry in places; written, rather than spoken. Symptomatic of this was the vocabulary of the characters that suggested to me the lexicon of an academic more than the kind of words that people ordinarily use - perceptible, conjecture, hypothetical, surrepetitious are just some examples - and they came out at moments where I wanted more of a sense of their pain than their nuanced reading of the situation.

The partner of that dryness was the play’s stasis. In Act I, the characters are, naturally enough, stuck and unmoving. But their eloquence somehow undermined that. The first scene has the family - she enthusiastically, he reluctantly - consulting a psychic (sorry ‘sensitive’) to find her son. Curiously, when you might have expected a sense of expectation, tension, the mother daring to hope for a breakthrough but also steeled for disappointment, caught between belief and scepticism, and so on, all of that potential is squandered in words. The mother doesn’t even shut up when Joyce is trying to listen to the voices.

There are other odd moments like this, characters seeming to drift away from the urgency of the situation to reflect on the world. Most bizarrely this happens in the last scene; there’s a boy with a hospitalisable injury on the floor and while the scene begins with an ambulance being called and some anxiety for his wellbeing, the couple start chatting away almost forgetting the bleeding youth on their floor. Explanations could be given for that, though I was quite baffled by the choreography of the end of Act I. They’re waiting in a private room for Adam. The boy’s grandfather has asked his girlfriend (maybe) to meet the boy off the plane and bring him to them. Apparently this is because they don’t want to be reunited on camera (but why the girlfriend? We’ve already established that the mother hates her). Then it gets weirder. The girlfriend has a sign with his name on and leaves. Then a few minutes later, she has apparently met him but rushes in alone, saying he’s coming. What happened? She said hello, pointed at the door then ran off ahead of him? Didn’t make sense to me, nor could I see what dramaturgical convenience it served.

Finally, it’s a class thing. The characters were very wealthy, very bourgeois. Now I have no problem with the upper-middle classes being shown on stage and I guess there’s an image here of the guilty rich looking fearfully at the rest of the world, wondering if they are admired or envied, aspired to or hated; but this production certainly made them seem like a right pair of cunts, insufferable, snooty, pleased with themselves, self-involved. There’s something that annoys me about wine on stage; it’s often a sign of something, always a class indicator, suggesting a bit of bohemianism, especially if it’s red, especially if somebody mentions the grape. Wine on stage seems to be stuck in 1972. I suppose I felt that this play, which is asking about the kind of world we live in, wondering about the permanence and relevance of western values, the continuation of the Enlightenment Project perhaps, seemed myopically trapped within its own class bubble, really not seeing anything beyond it. Fine if that were just the couple, less good when it feels like the play too.

I haven’t read the play and it may be that I’ve been led astray by a curiously unsympathetic production - the set rather sterile, the acting rather disengaged I felt - and the play’s better than it could be. Certainly there were some aberrant line readings. I like Shelagh’s plays; this one didn’t do it for me.