Atonement Hits the Stage: World Premiere Review

Atonement (Festival Theatre, Chichester)

Verdict: Lean morality tale

Star rating: 3/5

Atonement is not without its flaws. Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel can seem as stuffy as a pheasant shoot at Sandringham. And although the film starring and James McAvoy fillets the book well enough, it’s still a frustratingly thwarted love story. Even the title’s ‘atonement’ is as much of a hoax as the spurious twist that sets the plot in motion.

Yet the tale, which opens in a 1930s stately home, holds a curious, faintly morbid fascination for us, as posh little busybody Briony, 13, destroys a romance between her sister Cecilia and her lower-class lover Robbie, by accusing him of rape.

McEwan’s potboiler even survives Adam Penford’s cold-blooded staging which presents the story as if it was a swanky Vogue photoshoot.

Thankfully the second half, steeped in the gore of war, ensures it eventually finds a pulse.

Before that, the show is too chic for its own good. Knightley’s famous slinky green dress is worn with panache by another young beauty, Miriam Petche, as Cecilia.

But the script by Christopher Hampton (writer-adaptor of the Oscar-winning Dangerous Liaisons), is almost as skimpy as said silk frock. Hampton ditches much of the characters’ emotional colour, leaving only a bare bones morality tale.

There is, at first, little for Petche to get hold of – beyond the derriere of boyfriend Robbie (Jasper Talbot). But even their sexual congress is as discreet as a footman’s whisper in a King’s ear.

She becomes more vigorous after the interval, abandoning her girlishness for womanhood, while Talbot’s character is greatly enhanced by having to grapple with the dreadful slaughter at Dunkirk.

Most of us could cheerfully throttle aspiring young writer and fantasist Briony who sets up all the trouble.

But Isabella Dempster catches her naivety and remorse – before Jessica Turner finishes the job as her older self 60 years on (the part was meant to be played by Sian Phillips, who sadly had to step down).

The production doesn’t solve the story’s shortcomings, and Anthony Ward’s gorgeously sterile design almost disinfects it of life altogether. But the elusive magic of McEwan’s epic saga once more atones for its faults.

Atonement runs at Chichester Festival Theatre until June 20. 

Under The Shadow (Almeida, London)

Verdict: Spooky Iranian soap

Star rating: 3/5 

Shame, guilt and impotence are also at the heart of another stage adaptation: the 2016 Iranian horror film Under The Shadow, about a woman and her daughter struggling to cope in 1980s Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war. But I did wonder if it could lose the faintly comic Hammer Horror scenes involving a rogue ‘djinn’ (as in gin and tonic) - an evil spirit delivered into a flat overhead on one of Saddam’s rockets.

Without such supernatural shenanigans, Carmen Nasr’s adaptation and Nadia Latif’s production might have been forced to take more seriously the plight of the mother, Shideh, who is harangued by superstitious neighbours, and prevented from completing her medical training by Islamist bureaucrats who suspect her of being a troublemaker.

Despite deploying B-movie clichés around faulty electrics, a possessed TV set, and a long fingered, black-robed djinn preying on children, Latif’s production makes an intriguing soap opera. Leila Farzad is wholly credible as the desperate mother – although her control gives little sense she’s losing her marbles.

More eye-catching this week was Erin Jemmotte as her daughter Dorsa, who’s lost a precious doll and gives mum high-risk feedback, including dismissing her housework as ‘just tidying up’. Now that takes some bottle.

 Under The Shadow is on at the Almeida until July 4.

ALSO PLAYING...REVIEWS BY GEORGINA BROWN

The Marquise (Touring)

Verdict: A talent to amuse

Star rating: 4/5 

Lesser performed – indeed hardly ever – because let’s be frank, it’s lesser Coward and few have heard of this 1927 play.

Written as a ‘star vehicle’ for an aging Marie Tempest, she – and it – were a brief triumph.

In a very smart move, director Philip Wilson has pushed the setting of the show (which launched its tour in Windsor last week) from 18th-century France into the Thirties, replacing corsets and cleavages with sexy trouser suits flowing from padded shoulders.

Even smarter, with Juliet Aubrey in the hot seat as the scintillating, spirited, scheming Marquise, the piece purrs along like a Roller.

It begins a little stiffly in a gorgeous deco drawing room – all curves and squares – where two old friends, a dyspeptic Raoul (a portly Simon Shepherd) and cheerful Esteban (Tristan Gemmell, solid silver fox) are celebrating the engagement of their respective daughter and son, Adrienne and Miguel.

The reason for the stiffness is quickly revealed: Adrienne (feisty Eva o’Hara) is in love with Jacques, her father’s secretary (an irresistible, chubby-cheeked charmer given tremendous bounce by Albie Marber) and Miguel (Barnaby Tobias) is mad about a ballet dancer (in this version, a chap).

This is surely the only play in which the promise ‘I won’t marry you’ is heard with such unadulterated joy.

When Aubrey’s Marquise glides in, evidently a blast from Raoul’s past but possibly a figment of his imagination (shades of Coward’s Blithe Spirit), it quickly turns out that she’s the real thing.

Moreover, she’s the play’s engine, driving the preposterous romantic chaos into high comic gear in Wilson’s wonderfully well-oiled (and well-spoken) production.

In the final scene, the Marquise sits at the piano with the man (no spoilers) she has chosen ‘to house, clothe and adore’ her to sing ‘If Love Were All’ (from Coward’s Bittersweet). ‘Life is very rough and tumble,’ they trill as they are joined by more happy couples.

But one person stands alone.

Slight stuff certainly, but deliciously bittersweet.

For tour details visit kenwright.com 

Driftwood (Kiln Theatre, Kilburn, London)

Verdict: A battle for possession

Star rating: 3/5

Set in 1956 in a Port of Spain ‘gentlemen’s club’ in Trinidad, pre-independence, each of the characters in Martina Laird’s debut play symbolises a fragment of the island’s colonial past and its possible future.

A horribly entitled, patronising old Brit, Mansion, owns the place.

Pearl has run it forever, helped by her lighter skinned daughter Ruby (possibly Mansion’s child?).

Both women evidently feel they have earned their right to the place.

Then swaggering, strutting Diamond washes up and announces himself as the son Pearl abandoned decades ago.

For the local bent cop of Indian origin, the club – more of a bordello, really – is where he brings randy tourists in return for a glass of rum and a backhander. One of them, an American sailor and a reckless chancer, reckons he can use it for his smuggling operation.

It’s a promising set-up by Laird, a wonderful actor who grew up in Trinidad and is best known as Comfort the paramedic from Casualty. The club is a metaphor for the Island – and also the crucible for everyone’s hope and dreams, somewhere to make their own. It’s a battle for possession. ‘The vultures are circling,’ says one.

In Justin Audibert’s atmospheric staging, strong performances bring the patois-speaking characters to life as individuals - but their relationships are more convenient than convincing. Like the light bulb spluttering in the room because of the ropey wiring, this play sparks and stutters with little tension or urgency.

Without even the faintest flicker of attraction, Ruby and Diamond fall into an incestuous affair which, even more inexplicably, no one finds shocking.

It is only in the final scene that Laird’s best idea comes into sharp focus, when Martins Imhangbe’s rough Diamond forces Ellen Thomas’s Pearl, hardened by hardship, to voice her love for the child she lost and found. Too late for her, but just in time to save this undercooked, overheated drama.

Driftwood runs at the Kiln until July 4.