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Who Are You
Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
AS GLASGOW revs up for environmental talks, Timberlake Wertenbaker serves up a sly undercutting of middle-class hypocrisy in this spooky tale of an elderly woman who comes home to find someone else in her house.
At first she is aghast and angry, but over the course of an hour’s conversation her indignation subsides and her defences collapse.
The visitor is seductive and articulate, and implacably logical. She won’t be moved, and the essence of the play is the impasse between arguments that cannot be reconciled: one is based on property, and the other on coexistence.
Don’t ask who are you, says the visitor. Ask how are you…
The dialogue plays on fear of the other, and a bourgeois fear of the unpropertied. Is the visitor a migrant, or a Gypsy, or a homeless beggar?
A predictable and believeable social distaste spins out the sketch, but it is the spectre of looming environmental revenge allows Wertenbaker to bully her female victim, who clings primly to the misplaced “dignity” of her solitude and self-righteousness, and to no avail.
Georgie Glen’s Vivian is sufficiently self-aware to misconstrue her visitor as a “terrorist Eco-wacko,” and then to doubt her own sanity: “I feel disturbed. You are the face of my disturbances if I’m imagining you…”
Undermining the supposed sanity of reason based on property is precisely the tactic of her protagonist whose aim is to “dismantle a closed mind.”
The reasoning undoes the logic of ownership. She will “get through a fence,” until she demands, in the language of Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers of the English Revolution, that she “give up her enclosures.”
So far, so good, but the disappointment is that the play contents itself with the act of bullying an elderly woman and finds nowhere to go thereafter.
Rather than developing the characters and demonstrating a change of attitude and a new course of action, it is happy to vanish into an imaginary natural apocalypse instead of anything political or reasonable, or effective.
It’s a bad dream, and no more.
ANGUS REID
Ends November 10, [email protected] and (0131) 248-4848 / [email protected].
