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A CurtainUp London Review
The Red Barn
"There is text, but no subtext; there is plot but no subplot." —The novelist Julian Barnes writing about Georges Simenon's unique style in the National Theatre programme
The Red Barn
Mark Strong as Donald Dodd (Photo: Manuel Harlan)
Coupled with Mark Strong, the star of Ivo van Hove's A View From the Bridge, award winning director Robert Icke (Oresteia) brings an immensely stylish production of The Red Barn to the National Theatre's Lyttelton. The female stars are also a big draw. Elizabeth Debicki was the interesting and elegant actor everyone was talking about in the BBC serialisation of The Night Manager where she played the girlfriend of a corrupt businessman (Hugh Laurie) whom Tom Hiddleston's Night Manager fell for. Hope Davis is well knowm to New York theatre audiences and was nominated for a Tony in Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage.

The change of title from La Main or The Hand to The Red Barn echoes the famous Victorian melodrama Maria Marten and the Murder in the Red Barn which was based on a real life murder of a woman by her lover in Suffolk. David Hare has provided the translation of the Georges Simenon novel and presumably the "Red Barn" title. But the byline now has it as new play by David Hare. The play opens on an atmospherically snow storm filled night somewhere in New England. Tom Gibbons' soundscape stores up the terror of a wild night but first we see a woman at the optician's, her eye in huge close up, the aperture through the pupil opening to give a cinematic view of the storm.

The images are outstanding, cut scenes opening and closing and giving tantalising glimpses of the action before switching to another revealing but unconnected aperture. This production from Robert Icke and Bunny Christie is the most stylish you can experience but the brilliant design highlights the flaws, the inertia in the script. Maybe Simenon is better on the page with just one's whirring imagination because The Red Barn seems at times to slow so much that it is not to be seen if you are in any way soporific.

The division of scenes by the closing of one aperture and the opening of another delineates the separation of scenes in the same way as a film's switching of scene. It is a highly skilled transition from the stage to the cinematic. Sound and lighting support these transitions into filmic clips.

Patrick Marnham, a biographer of Georges Simenon writes about, "The theme of sexual jealousy (is) so intense that it can lead to murder." These articles make me determined to explore Simenon's Maigret novels but probably in translation. Marnham tells us that towards the end of the war, Simenon had been discovered by his wife,Tigy in bed with her maid, Boule. The Simenons stayed together for their son Marc but Georges Simenon and family travelled to New York in 1945 in order to escape the privations of war torn France and presented himself as if he were on a (fictitious) mission from Belgium to the American publishing industry. Within weeks he was having an affair with Denyse Ouimet, seventeen years his junior and his French Canadian secretary. He "was not only in love but furiously jealous and his obsession meant he was no longer in control." This 1968 novella is a tiny Simenon work, in the middle of the Inspector Maigret oeuvres, which must hark back to his passionate obsession.

So the theme of The Red Barn is sexual jealousy. Mark Strong plays Donald Dodd who has no idea what has hit him when he launches into an affair with Mona Sanders (a languid Elizabeth Debicki). Through flashbacks we return to the cocktail party before the storm where Mona's husband, Ray Sanders (Nigel Whitmey) is opportunistically pleasuring a female party goer in a bathroom before he disappears on the way back to the Dodds' New Connecticut country home in the storm.

Strong plays the stultifyingly ordinary Dodd as he realises his life is full of inadequacy and mundanity. We hark back to a scene with his father full of parental put downs. He tries to talk to his wife, the excellent Hope Davis, as she looks sad and avoids the issues in stiff upper lip tradition of the New English landowning class while quietly manipulating. Elizabeth Debicki is very tall and has heightened stage presence. She plays a woman who seems strangely lacking in passion and emotion. Maybe that's how you remain content as an exceptionally beautiful woman when married to a man like Ray Sanders.

The Red Barn has a cultish feel in this very still production. It lets you soak up the atmosphere rather than thrill to the usual suspense of a murder mystery.





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PRODUCTION NOTES
The Red Barn
Written by David Hare after La Main by Georges Simenon
Directed by Robert Icke
Starring: Mark Strong, Hope Davis, Elizabeth Debicki
With: Stuart Milligan, Nigel Whitmey, Anna Skellern, Oliver Alvin-Wilson, Jade Yourell, Michael Elwyn
Designed by Bunny Christie
Sound Design: Tom Gibbons
Lighting Design: Paule Constable
Video and Projection Designer: Tim Reid
Running time: One hour 50 minutes without an interval
Box Office: 020 7452 3000
Website: www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
Booking to 13th January 2017
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 25th October 2016 performance at the Lyttelton Theatre, Royal National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 9PX (Rail/Tube: Waterloo)
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