"Two Hands Clapping"
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| Stars range from 5-1. |
Before you
can take your seat at the tiny Theater C at 59E59 Theaters you have to pass the
small stage on which, sitting on a red leather-covered trunk, is a pretty blonde,
smartly dressed (costumes are by Meriel Pym) in late 50s style, mink coat and
all. This is Janet Shirley (Eve Burley), the heroine of Anthony Burgess’s ONE
HAND CLAPPING, a 1961 satirical British novel newly adapted and directed for
the stage by Lucia Cox and now visiting New York as part of the Brits Off
Broadway festival. The production was originally given by the House of Orphans in Manchester, UK.
Janet’s in a room whose floral wallpaper (the set is also by Ms. Pym) suggests provincial middle-class domesticity; there’s a period TV in the room, but a surreal touch is added by three additional small-screen sets placed on the set’s periphery. Each of the latter is practical and made much use of during the performance, especially for showing vintage commercials that underline the play’s anti-consumerist theme.
As the
house lights dim, Janet (who often speaks directly to us) introduces herself, rattling
on in a rapidly paced, relentlessly perky, regional accent (which took me a few
minutes to grasp). She says she’s going to tell us her story, noting, “Whether
you believe it or not is your business and not mine.” We're told she was 23 and
her husband, Howard (Oliver Devoti), 27, when the story, which seems to be a few years in the past, took place.
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| Eve Burley. Photo: Emma Phillipson. |
In the
story, Howard, a used-car salesman, has an all-encompassing dread about the
possibilities of nuclear annihilation and a psychopathic cynicism about
modernization, consumerism, and the Americanization of England. He therefore decides
to take advantage of his “photographic brain,” which he’s actually ashamed of
because he didn’t earn the knowledge it gives him the way a scholar might have.
He wins 1,000 pounds on a TV quiz show and then trains himself to read the
future about a horse race, raising his winnings to 79,000 pounds. Clearly
bonkers by now, his plan is to spend the money on all the luxuries he and Janet
can enjoy within a month and then “snuff” their lives out on her birthday as a
protest against modern civilization. As he declares, “When all’s said and done,
there’s not all that much to live for, is there?”
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| Oliver Devoti. Photo: Emma Phillipson. |
Janet,
however, despite the jewels, furs, wine, fine food, and travel the money has
been providing (including a trip across America), is content to live her simple
life—stocking groceries at the supermarket, sitting by the fire, watching the
telly, drinking tea, cooking meals of fish sticks and ketchup—and isn’t so
ready to go gentle into that good night. As the play nears its humorously
macabre conclusion (like an episode on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”), we
understand why its storyteller was seated as she was when the play began, and
what it is that’s inside the camphorwood trunk on which she’s sitting.
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| Oliver Devoti. Photo: Emma Phillipson. |
Ms. Cox’s compact,
80-minute, one-act version of Burgess’s novel moves swiftly under her
direction, with the actors performing with comically heightened behavior to
highlight the play’s semi-absurdist style. The adorably attractive Ms. Burley
is all bright-eyed and bushytailed in playing Janet’s directness and
enthusiasm, while Mr. Devoti’s Howard makes a perfect foil, seeming to be almost
robotically programmed and emotionally distant. As the host of the TV show on
which Howard appears, Adam Urey is amusingly over-unctuous, while his portrayal
of a preening poet whom Howard patronizes is appropriately energetic.
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| Adam Urey. Photo: Emma Phillipson. |
The play’s
title, a phrase from a Zen koan (“What is the sound of one hand clapping?”), is
also the name of a play Janet and Howard attend in London because Howard read
that it deals “with the decay and decadence in the world about us.” Howard observes
that using one’s imagination when pondering “one hand clapping” is “supposed to
be a way of getting to God.” I can’t vouch for that, but when ONE HAND CLAPPING
ended last night, I responded with the sound of two hands clapping.
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| Eve Burley, Oliver Devoti. Photo: Emma Phillipson. |