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An awesome and ridiculous film that leaves you thrilled beyond the point of your natural endurance
2012
Theatre
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Blood Brothers
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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
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London,
Henry Hitchings's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Matthew Lloyd.
Cast: Juliet Stevenson, Henry Goodman
Description: Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman star in Tom Kempinski's drama about an acclaimed violinist suffering from multiple sclerosis. Directed by Matthew Lloyd.
Trains: Tube/BR: Charing Cross 
Phone: 0870890 0511
Website: www.nimaxtheatres.com
Double act: Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman
“I just want to hear how you feel,” insists Henry Goodman’s studious psychiatrist Dr Feldmann in the opening scene of Tom Kempinski’s two‑hander.
Whether or not he truly does just want to hear, a tsunami of feelings batters his ears across six sessions of therapy with Juliet Stevenson’s Stephanie, a fortysomething violinist in the grip of multiple sclerosis.
The “duet for one” of the title is Stephanie’s journey of reluctant self‑acknowledgement. She comes to terms with the implications of her condition not by slow degrees but in wild fits and starts, graduating from the elegant pleasantries of her first meeting with Feldmann, through flighty and then shrewish denial, to hostility and self-lacerating grief.
Feldmann, who barely has to turn the pages as Stephanie rockets from adagio to prestissimo, initially seems a caricature of the knowing Teutonic shrink, a fraudulent Freud-lite. But his is a carefully measured performance and its early forced restraint is brilliantly exploded in the strong second half. Matthew Lloyd’s revival of this early Eighties success has been lovingly conceived. Lez Brotherston’s design is richly imagined and the production bubbles with piquant details: the descent of Stephanie’s wardrobe from buttock-hugging Armani to frumpy cast-offs a perfectly calibrated index of her mood. No detail resonates more plangently than the word emblazoned on her motorised wheelchair: Karma.
Stevenson as the karmically challenged Stephanie is the evening’s star. Her performance is nuanced, unsentimental and affecting. As a dissection of the redemptive powers of music (and of therapy), Duet for One is not wholly credible but as a platform for a protean actor at the height of her powers it works stunningly.
Until 1 August (0844 811 0053).
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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