Aunt Dan and Lemon: Royal Court Theatre
MERCIFULLY, we now come to the end of the Royal Court's season dedicated to Wallace Shawn, who is to play-writing what William McGonagall was to poetry.
This third and last play is a revival of his 1985 work, hailed as a masterpiece by the kind of people who think that naked emperors are dandily dressed.
Like the dire Grasses of a Thousand Colours, it begins with the central character bidding the audience hello, and we know we are in for another evening of rambling monologues as a substitute for drama.
In this case, the main talker is Lemon (Jane Horrocks), a youngish Englishwoman of independent means with nothing to do but read books about Nazi death camps, whose efficiency she rather admires, and reminisce about her childhood in thrall to Aunt Dan, a supposedly charismatic family friend (played by Lorraine Ashbourne).
This Dan – it's short for Danielle – is an American with an obsessive crush on Henry Kissinger and an admiration for his robust approach to Vietnam.
Via Lemon's flashbacks, we are treated to Dan's own monologues on this subject, as well as her forthright descriptions of sex and her memories of a cast of louche characters who act out a murderous form of courtship in disjointed tableaux which seem to bear no relation to the rest of the piece.
Like all of Shawn's "characters" – that may be too generous a term – she is an opinionated bore who repeats each banal opinion on average five times, often using the same words.
So tedious and repetitive is she that it's a complete mystery why Lemon could ever have fallen under her sway – although that pales in comparison with the greater mystery of why anyone would expect us to sit through two solid hours of this stuff, without interval.
It ends with the charmless Lemon opining that the Nazi extermination of the Jews is not much different to America's annihilation of its native population or a householder tackling an infestation of cockroaches.
This is meant to challenge the cosy thinking of liberal theatregoers, which I've no objection to per se.
My problem is that Shawn is incapable of putting a conflict of ideas into dramatic form. He is not particularly interested in character, has no ear for language (he thinks that the British refer to Americans as "Yankees"), and cannot write an eloquent theatrical speech to save his life.
Director Dominic Cooke does his best to imbue the production with atmosphere, with shadowy memory-figures haunting the set and lots of incidental music.
Horrocks, in her poshest, most mannered voice, gives Lemon a brittle callousness, but the loud, exuberant Ashbourne still cannot make Dan the vibrant figure that Shawn wants her to be.
My companion gave me a hard kick after an hour, as a rebuke for inflicting this excruciating bilge on him. I'm tempted to sue the Royal Court for the damage to my shin.
VERDICT 1/5
Royal Court Theatre, London, 020 7565 5000, till June 27
