Morning:
13°c
London faces a wave of bus and Tube strikes that could cause chaos for millions of passengers as unions walkout over pay and conditions
More...
An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
The show has suddenly become quite wonderful, and the galvanising factor is the terrific stage debut of Melanie C
Blood Brothers
Music
The British pop music industry may be eating itself but if Muse are the pick of what it can offer the world in 2010 then British music is in rude health indeed
Muse
I was smitten by both Gilberts enormous luxuriant moustache and the intelligence and nuance of this highly entertaining play
I totally recommend Babbo to anyone who is looking for really good and traditional Italian food
Always been a fan but never seen them live. I was ecstatic to be part of this epic event. WOW!
London,
Evening Standard rating
Reader rating
Dir: James Macdonald.
Cast: National Theatre
Description: New production of James Joyce's only play, directed by James Macdonald. Returning to Dublin after nine years, Richard and Bertha wonder whether infidelity will hold them together.
Exiles: no marriage guidance
Even though James Joyce's only play, Exiles, is unexpectedly traditional in form and structure, its psychologically nuanced portrait of a marriage in emotional distress manifests a startling modernity. Its ideas about sexual freedom and experiment within a traditionally closed marital framework remind us that some Edwardians were free radicals.
If it had not been for Hildegard Bechtler's dreamy, glass-walled evocation of a dusky, Edwardian drawing room in a Dublin suburb, her period costumes and the relative formality of speech and address, you could almost take the play as a 21st-century warning on that successor to the marital love triangle - the daunting figure of the erotic rectangle and how it comes to be drawn.
Completed in 1918, but not given a full-scale London production until Harold Pinter directed it in 1970, Exiles offers a barely disguised selfportrait of James Joyce the literary artist as a homoerotic masochist. The focus is upon a willed act of adultery.
Richard Rowan,the husband in Exiles, mysteriously encourages his wife, Bertha, into an extra-marital fling with his best friend, the journalist Robert Hand.
Rowan's motives and Bertha's true feelings remain tantalisingly shrouded in doubt and never elucidated. It is the attempt to set adultery in motion that gives the play its driving animus, with Richard kept informed by Bertha of each erotic move on a sexual journey supposed to end in the bedroom.
Peter McDonald's enthralling performance of becalmed, brooding intraversion ensures the husband keeps his inscrutability intact. At first, though, Rowan's intense encounter with Marcella Plunkett's attractively melancholic Beatrice, Robert's cousin and former fiancee, make it seem he wants Bertha bound for adultery so as to feel free to move in the same direction.
Yet in the Ibsenite and key scene of confrontation, Richard confesses a passionate longing to be betrayed by his best friend and wife, a confession that Adrian Dunbar's histrionic Robert seizes upon for his own sexual advantage. Dunbar, who looks too old to be playing Richard's contemporary, imposes a style of histrionic, comic bonhomie upon his character that fatally sabotages any sense of the men being bound by more than convenience.
MacDonald's production sacrifices Exiles' governing mood of perverse and agonised sexual confusion, which McDonald, Miss Plunkett and Dervla Kirwan's troubled Bertha powerfully transmit, in favour of Dunbar's misguided, winsome perkiness. James Joyce is accordingly done down.
• Until 26 October. Information: 020 7452 3000.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
