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London,

Performance of a lifetime in Duet For One

By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard  30.01.09

I WAS pained, enthralled and finally exhilarated by Matthew Lloyd’s superb production of Tom Kempinski’s Eighties play, in which a famous, married violinist, forcibly retired by multiple sclerosis at 42, seeks therapy from a German-born psychiatrist. How can she live the remaining years of a now curtailed life, all joy gone?

Today, when celebrities enjoy few things more than exposing intimate aspects of their private lives to the prurient public, Duet For One comes as a fresh antidote to such posturings and phoneyness. It is enhanced by performances of overwhelming emotional power and conviction by Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman. The play’s source of inspiration may have been the great cellist, Jacqueline du Pré, who died after years of MS, but thereafter the similarities end.

Kempinski gives a searing impression of the anguish and disturbance involved in probing the regions of the subconscious, whose secrets may help illuminate our lives if brought to the surface. The Duet For One can therefore be likened to a drama in which the mind conceals a mystery waiting to be solved.

When Stevenson’s Stephanie Abrahams, wheelchair-bound wife of a fashionable composer, arrives at the consulting room of Goodman’s bearded epitome of the German-Jewish psychotherapist, Dr Feldmann, she maintains a valiant, witty composure. She suggests that plans to act as her husband’s secretary and to teach exceptional pupils the violin are proof of fighting-spirit, to bolster which Feldmann prescribes anti-depressants.

Then as the sessions continue, as the psychotherapist raises questions about her childless marriage, conflict with her father, the early death of a mother who had abandoned a concert pianist’s career and, crucially, about her own marriage, Stephanie’s façade is pierced. As with some Ibsen heroine, who has shielded herself from her past, Stevenson magnificently erupts in a volcanic outpouring of fury and tears and succumbs to hopeless dejection. It’s the performance of a lifetime. But after Goodman’s mint-sucking shrink, perfect epitome of mannered inscrutability, loses his temper, he offers a glimmer of challenging hope that startles her as it does us. A triumph.

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