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Henry Hitchings's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Dominic Cooke.
Cast: Lorraine Ashbourne, Jane Horrocks, Mary Roscoe
Description: Wallace Shawn's drama about a man's favourite aunt and the stories that she told him as a child. Directed by Dominic Cooke.
Trains: Tube: Sloane Square 
Phone: 0207565 5000
Website: www.royalcourttheatre.com
Impressive: Scarlett Johnson as Mandy and Jane Horrocks as Lemon
The title of Wallace Shawn’s 1985 play makes it sound like a children’s story. But although Lemon (Jane Horrocks) is waifish and even winsome, there’s nothing cute or reassuring about this talky, fragmented essay in moral gymnastics.
The action — if we can call it that, for this is a play that could easily be performed on the radio — is bookended by two of Shawn’s characteristically long speeches, both by Lemon.
In between, there are flashbacks to her childhood and to events she heard about from family friend Danielle, a garrulous and sassy Oxford don otherwise known as Aunt Dan.
The summer she was 11, Lemon fell under the older woman’s influence; Aunt Dan would visit her at bedtime and tell her “about every complicated subject in the world”. Aunt Dan’s unorthodox ideas — among them the notion that Henry Kissinger was “a simple, warm, affectionate man” — inform Lemon’s worldview, and the sickly twentysomething we see at the start and close of the play is really a crank, who praises the Nazis for their “refreshing” lack of compassion and seems to think there is hardly any difference between squashing a cockroach and committing genocide.
Lemon’s tone is polite and therefore has an air of apparent reasonableness. But the case she makes for believing the rebarbative — that the gap between a decent person and a monster is practically invisible — is meant to test the audience’s forensic powers.
Besides inviting us to pick holes in her logic, Shawn expects us to examine the boundaries in our own moral lives. What does it mean to exercise power? When does the end not justify the means?
In the central role of Lemon, Jane Horrocks is impressive. She switches deftly between the comic and the pathetic, adopting an array of tones: conspiratorial, steely, preacherly, wide-eyed.
As the supposedly compelling Aunt Dan, Lorraine Ashbourne is too strident but the smaller roles in the flashbacks are sharply directed by Dominic Cooke and solidly acted: Paul Chahidi and Martin McDougall catch the eye, while Scarlett Johnson relishes her turn as a ruthless seductress.
Still, this is a bizarre and unsatisfying play. Shawn deliberately offers little in the way of either story or closure. He wants before all else to challenge the audience’s apathy. He may succeed in this but his writing is structurally frustrating and rhetorically overbearing. Aunt Dan and Lemon will make audiences squirm — and not always for the reasons intended.
Until 27 June.
Information: 020 7565 5000,
www.royalcourttheatre.com.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Henry Hitchings is being incredibly kind. during Dans "speeches" i wanted to scream "shut up for gods sake!!!" possibly the worse play i have seen. ever.
- Trace, london
Agreed. Who's idea was the Wallace Shawn season?? I had more fun daydreaming in my head while waiting for the show's 1.5 hours to be up.
- Susan Belleview, London
