Review: Ninety

Ninety by Joanna Murray-Smith, directed by Simon Phillips. Designed by Andrew Bellchambers, lighting design by Nick Schlieper. With Melinda Butel and Kim Gyngell. Melbourne Thetare Company @ the Fairfax Studio, Victorian Arts Centre, until October 4.

Joanna Murray-Smith’s latest play, Ninety, is a short portrait of a failed marriage. Isabel, an art restorer, has begged ninety minutes from her former husband (and now hugely successful film star) William, before he flies off to Paris to marry another woman.

Isabel (Melinda Butel) wants William (Kim Gyngell) back, and in particular wants to remind him about a past he is wholly denying. And in the hour and a half he grants her, they relive the highs and bitter lows of their relationship.

There are two ways of reading this play, which in fact seems rather like two different plays jammed unsatisfactorily together. One is to take it at face value, as an affirmation of the unbreakable bonds forged through the shared joys and griefs of marriage. The two narrate their history (employing the obligatory device of flashbacks), stripping away the defensive aggression with which they greet each other to reach a mutual understanding of what they have shared.

The other interpretation is more interesting, perhaps reaching towards the forensic incision of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage (which Murray-Smith recently adapted). But without Bergman’s excoriating compassion and emotional precision, this subtext sits uneasily inside the first, and never integrates into a fertile ambiguity.

In this second reading, Ninety is an unrelievedly bleak portrayal of contemporary marriage. Neither character seems to have an inner life: their personalities are expressed, like the murderer in American Psycho, solely in terms of material possessions and social status.

A surface wit elides what is at times a breath-taking cynicism in the characters, in their relationships to each other, to themselves and to art. They talk about love all the time, but what they call love is merely narcissistic self-reflection: Isabel even claims at one point that women only fall in love in response to a man’s desire.

The single breach in their mutual self-absorption is their daughter, Bea. The play shifts gear in the final half hour, when we discover that she is dead. And in the end, the only thing these two people have in common is their grief and loss.

Murray-Smith’s grasp of writerly form is never certain enough to sustain the acuteness required to make this interpretation wholly work: the script’s toughnesses are undermined by the play’s constant reassurances to the audience that nothing too uncomfortable is going to happen. The promise of the emotional pornography of self-revelation is, in the end, what drives the drama.

The switch in the play is engineered clunkily by the plot device of the dead child, and its dramatic climax feels unearned. There are a couple of wonderful monologues where the script lifts into dramatic expressiveness, but for the most part the language settles for reportage rather than gestic action, which undermines its ironies. Too often one feels the cynical jokes are to be taken at face value.

Simon Phillips gives Ninety an elegant production in the round which features strong performances from both actors. Gyngell in particular is compelling. The minimal set consists of a revolve which imperceptibly moves one and a half turns – like a clock hand going through an hour and a half - during the course of the show. It revealed when it reached my side that the painting Isobel is restoring is a bad copy of Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage.

Which maybe favours the first reading. I’m still not sure; perhaps both are intended, but are not sufficiently integrated to generate the energy of true contradiction. In the end, I didn’t enjoy thinking about this play, for many reasons. But mostly because it left me feeling empty and rather depressed; it looks into the abyss of human self-deception without any of the spiritual sharpening that makes doing so worthwhile.

A shorter version of this review appeared in yesterday’s Australian.