Clive Owen underplays it in this earth-bound Butterfly - M. Butterfly, Cort Theatre, Broadway, review
The qualities that make Clive Owen such a powerful and enigmatic film actor haven’t translated to the stage of Cort Theatre. That’s where he’s headlining a lackluster Broadway revival of M. Butterfly, the nearly 30-year-old Tony Award-winning American play inspired by the true story of a French diplomat convicted of espionage, who claimed he wasn’t aware that his Chinese mistress was actually a man and a spy.
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It’s delectable material, but Owen gives a performance that’s often as confined as his character, René Gallimard. At the onset of David Henry Hwang’s play, set in 1986, Gallimard languishes in prison, where he’s haunted by the memory of Song Liling (impressive newcomer Jin Ha), whom he first encountered singing the title role in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly in Sixties Communist China.
As Gallimard replays the confounding story of their relationship for the next two hours and 20 minutes, Owen spends much of the proceedings rooting around for clues as to who this man is. Gallimard embodies Western arrogance toward the East, male dominance over the feminine, but the all-encompassing passion that drives his infatuation for Song to operatic heights registers only fleetingly. It’s a performance of intimate glances and quiet, bitter realisations that would probably play better on film.
Owen might have benefited from a surer directorial hand. M. Butterfly marks the first Broadway production from Lion King director Julie Taymor since her disastrous tenure on the Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark musical six years ago. That was the most expensive production in Broadway history; this one appears to have been done on a budget, especially the backdrops of Paul Steinberg’s set, boldly painted panels that slide around to delineate various locales. Taymor has always been a visually incisive director, and here (with choreographer Ma Cong) she’s created some beautiful extended opera sequences. But characterisation suffers.
Hwang rewrote portions of the play (originally staged in both New York and London by the late British director John Dexter) as he learned more about the real men who inspired it, Bernard Boursicot and Shi Pei Pu. In this updated version, Hwang explores Gallimard and Song’s relationship in greater depth, and there’s a rather graphic explanation of how Song tricked Gallimard into thinking he was having intercourse with a woman. Excised from this version are references to Gallimard being susceptible to Song’s charms because he’s not a very handsome guy. (The challenge of downplaying Owen’s attractiveness may have been too great.)
But fleshing out the play doesn’t strengthen what was already a solid work, groundbreaking in its time for the way it dealt with race and gender. M. Butterfly is at its most compelling when it tries to discern human mysteries. Was it love or ego that drew Gallimard to Song? Did Gallimard really have no idea that Song was a man, or did he sense that his perfectly submissive “Oriental” was too good to be true?
In Taymor’s production, these questions seem more like afterthoughts. The crux of M. Butterfly, the beauty and cruelty of Gallimard and Song’s knotty relationship, never fully takes flight.
Until Feb 25. Tickets: mbutterflybroadway.com
