Riveting and troubling insights on the frailty of human relationships - Belleville, Donmar Warehouse, review
The scene is Paris, an apartment in the Belleville quarter, une touche “bohème”. Every inch of space is accounted for, yet amid the clutter, described by the playwright Amy Herzog as “Ikea meets Parisian flea market”, resides much casual charm. Through the tall windows you sense the romantic metropolis. If this were a mini-break, you’d be in heaven. Would you want to live here, though, if you were a twentysomething American couple with an uncertain idea of the future?
Praised as “extraordinarily fine” when it premiered in New York in 2013, and absolutely proving to be so in this thrilling Donmar production starring James Norton and Imogen Poots, Belleville could be set in the Big Apple (Herzog’s hometown) or anywhere, really: wherever a married couple are shacked up and discovering things about eachother they can’t cope with.
Yet the location adds particular piquancy. As Adam Gopnik, former Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, has written: “For two centuries, Paris has been attached for Americans to an idea of happiness”; the violent shortfall in expectations here is accentuated.
“It’s the city of love, or the city of lights, which is it? Is it both?” burbles Poots’s Abby to her friendly downstairs French-Senegalese neighbour Alioune, who also happens to be the landlord. She’s reeling from the shock of stumbling across hubby Zack ogling porn on his laptop when he was supposed to be at work, conducting medical research into preventing children from contracting Aids. She’s putting a brave face on it but her manic garrulousness gives her away.
As Poots conveys, with quicksilver subtlety, beneath the surface brightness of a concertedly bubbly actress who has turned her hand to yoga teaching there’s doubt, and darkness too. Abby has abandoned French class (“The teacher made fun of my pronunciation”) and a communication breakdown has plainly been underway for some time with the man who should be her kindred spirit but now seems a long way removed from the guy in the wedding-photo album.
One of my favourite moments in Simon Gray’s Smoking Diaries is when he observes a good-looking couple locked into an icy spat in a restaurant in Greece – noting their body language, assuming the worst but “then he said something, she said something, he looked at her, she laughed, he laughed”.
The beauty of Belleville, which runs straight through for an hour and 40 minutes, is that while it arrives at a place of horror, which in lesser hands might smack of implausible melodrama, it never slackens its grip on truth.
At any moment, you feel, the couple could shift the direction of travel. Everything hangs on what is said, the way it is said. There are tremendous pressures pitting these Americans abroad against each other – a looming cashflow crisis, Zack’s furtive reliance on weed, the pain of separation Abby feels from her folks back home, more besides.
Yet Herzog detects enough good in each partner to show potential salvation dancing cheek to cheek with fierce psychological demons. What makes the evening so disquieting – and accomplished – is that we’re witness to the accumulative power of subtle nudges – each eggs the other on, wittingly and unwittingly, towards a primeval forest of fear, hurt and rage.
Norton just keeps making smart career moves: Zack combines some of the vicar-next-door niceness viewers loved in Granchester with the psychotic intensity at which the actor excelled as reviled rapist Tommy Lee Royce in Happy Valley. This former medical student looks so dependable, in white T-shirt and jeans, flashing a sexy, toothsome smile as he nibbles healingly at Abby’s stubbed toe – the duo even make out on the sofa at one moment of rekindled ardour. He registers relatable hurt when Abby displays a viciousness straight out of the Edward Albee book of marital put-downs, yet there’s also an inscrutable gleam in his eye that suggests he shouldn’t be allowed to toy too much with that kitchen knife.
In Michael Longhurst’s continually tense-making production, there’s superb support from Malachi Kirby and Faith Alabi as the landlord and his wife who look on in incredulity, disgust and pity at their visitors’ perturbing unravelling.
Set in the run-up to Christmas, the timing of the play’s arrival in London feels apt and yet it’s hardly going to spread much comfort or joy. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” though, as the boy Mamillius said in The Winter’s Tale. And that feels right: how frail it all is, how fragile we can all be; strangers to each other, and to ourselves.
Until Feb 3. Tickets: 020 3282 3808; donmarwarehouse.com
