Rialto Note:
Skylight
26 May 2015
It was not my intention to take Friday off from this Web log. I thought I’d write a short entry, wishing everyone a lovely Memorial Day weekend, but I never got to the desk. In the morning, Kathleen, taking the day off, was busy with her cameras, double-checking that she had rounded them all up, complete with manuals, cables, batteries, and so on. When she embarked on her errand — a beyond-her-dreams successful exchange at B&H Camera, from which she emerged with a very fine, mirror-less and therefore lightweight Sony — I settled in to a library-management session that took several hours. Then Ray Soleil arrived, to hang the last of the pictures, newly re-framed photographs taken by Kathleen years ago that had moldered, in the old apartment, along a wall that was half-blocked by a perpetually-open door. Just when he was about to leave, we got to talking, and soon we were sitting down to a good gossip, which lasted until it was time to dress for the theatre.
Except I was wrong about the theatre. After I’d gotten dressed, and while Kathleen, having had a nice nap, put her hair up, I made a show of examining the tickets, which I’d stashed in the breast pocket of my shirt. Yes, they were for Skylight. Yes, the curtain time was 8:00 PM. But how did it get to be the twenty-third so fast?
At least the tickets weren’t for the night-before’s performance.
So, we went out to dinner (I’d gotten dressed!), and nothing ever got written here on Friday. We went to Skylight the next evening. The John Golden Theater is on the small side, but its amenities — corridors, rest rooms — are smaller still. (There was a long line for the men’s room.) The prospect of the show to come —the curtain was raised — was equally dowdy. Skylight is set in a flat in Kensal Rise, in near-northwest London. While imaginative, Bob Crowley’s production design could not conceal the dumpiness of the premises, which would be demoralizing if the leading male character, here played by Bill Nighy, did not find it and them so outrageously unnecessary. The leading (and only) female character, here played by Carey Mulligan, has quite evidently elected a life of relative poverty, from which she could presumably escape at any time. The flat is, in short, a purgatory, in which she is expiating the sin at the heart of the play. Her redemption might not necessarily involve escape from Kensal Rise, but it would entail a deep understanding of it, something that we, too, come to feel in the final moments. Rarely can snow have fallen so beautifully — so pathetic-fallacy humanely — on a council estate.
But we did not go to see Skylight to be stirred up in a bubbling cauldron of infidelity, financialization, and social justice. David Hare handles his themes with amazing grace, but they’re still themes, and at this particular moment of 2015 there does not seem to be a lot to say about them.
- Infidelity — in this case, not so much the husband’s cheating on his (now dead) wife as the protégée’s, his lover’s, betraying her mentor, that same wife — is wrong, but this is not entirely clear while it is secret, because love, after all, is wonderful. The deeper lesson is that it is either wrong or very unwise — take your pick — to keep important secrets from your closest companion. (If you are not married to your closest companion, clear this up at once.)
- Financialization — the consumption and inevitable destruction of commerce by money — is capitalism’s most alienating consequence. (I still don’t regard it as inevitable, though.)
- Social Justice — as Joseph Mitchell said, there are no “little people.”
No, we went to see Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy on stage. I’d like to say that we went to see Matthew Beard, too, but I’d forgotten that he was in it, and even that there is a third character in Skylight (the man’s gap-year son, who was much shorter the last time the woman in the dump saw him). We did not see the first Broadway production, with Michael Gambon and Lia Williams. Which is a pity, because Bill Nighy so completely inhabited his role that (a) you forgot that he was Bill Nighy and (b, more to my point here) you couldn’t imagine Michael Gambon in it. Well, Kathleen couldn’t. I reminded her of David Margulies’s play, Collected Stories, of which we have seen three very different productions, with very different leading ladies — the late Uta Hagen, Maria Tucci, and Linda Lavin. Three rather different plays.
In their two films together, When Did You Last See Your Father and An Education, Carey Mulligan and Matthew Beard played young people of the same age. In Skylight, Ms Mulligan plays a woman nearly a generation older than Mr Beard’s character. The actors are in fact four years apart. The other night, Mr Beard, now 26, was utterly convincing as a scatty teenager. You might say that he danced his way through the performance. He was certainly responsible for carrying the play to its smiling ending.
What to say about Carey Mulligan? Stage goddess, definitely. I hope that she makes many movies, but not so many as to interfere with a humming career on stage. She already has the deep voice of an ageless diva, capable of oracular power. Why, her big speech about social justice got a round of applause, the only aria (so to speak) to do so. She was great not because she was impersonating a spellbinding character but because by some miracle of misdirection she was aiming her speech at the audience even as she seemed to be spitting at Bill Nighy. Our applause was a political response to righteous exhortation. That’s not at all out of place in a play by David Hare, but the point is that Carey Mulligan is capable of eliciting, demanding it — all the while looking astonishingly like Gene Tierney, who I don’t think ever really shouted at anybody.
And when she told Bill Nighy that she’d loved him more than anyone in the world, maybe more than she would ever love anybody, you understood her need for a penitential life-style. This was also, in its way, a political matter, but I’m sure that most of the audience felt it as high drama.