This is an extraordinarily intriguing, extraordinarily odd play.
Written by Joanna Murray-Smith, and first produced in 2014 by the Sydney Theatre Company, it’s since been produced around the world.
It presents the novelist Patricia Highsmith as she is visited in her Swiss home by an emissary from her American publisher.
Highsmith was a real person, the writer of many novels, including those featuring the protagonist Tom Ripley. (Admission: If it hadn’t been for the Matt Damon film, I probably would know nothing about either the real person or the fictional one.)
Ripley – as even myopic theatre reviewers like myself know – is talented. He is a master of deceit, seduction and, most of all, murder. In creating Ripley, Highsmith was on to a winner – or so the critics and the sales suggest. (To me, it all seems simply bizarre. Or untruthful. But the challenging of parochial assumptions about human nature is what this piece is all about.)
Anyway, in Murray-Smith’s invented meeting between writer and messenger, the bone of contention is whether Highsmith can be convinced to write one more Ripley novel before she dies. It’s a beautiful example of how clarity of motivation can keep us utterly hooked, while also providing the playwright with the most delicious opportunities for subversion.
The play is set late last century, and part of its fascination is how quickly the assumptions of the literary world Highsmith inhabited have come to seem so distant from those of the present.
In juxtaposition to our contemporary literary focus on bearing witness to what’s been done to us, here are at least three ideas the play provocatively throws forth:
- Writers are, or can be, neutral. (Like Switzerland.) Their job is not to tell us what is morally wrong. They simply present the truth of human nature. And they can do so in a way that renders our moral compass irrelevant. (Highsmith, apparently, makes us root for Ripley.)
- Writers have the ability to do what they do because of the horrible things that have happened to them. (Francis Bacon supposedly was locked in a cupboard as a child, and that’s why he became a great painter.) Our personal suffering does not position us to bear witness to injustice, but rather to see into the human heart, and to portray powerfully what we find there.
- The human heart is dark. Civilization is a veneer and, in truth, we are violent beasts. This idea has long be in stock, but our current focus on sociology rather than psychology has hidden it way at the back of the shelf.
Just these three ideas should send any audience out into the night burning with questions. (There’s a fourth idea I’d like to talk about, but I’ll get back to it at the end.) It’s a privilege to see such a rich, sophisticated, utterly engaging work.
Captivated by the play, I’ve said nothing about the production. Under Shaun Rennie’s direction, it’s brilliant.
Toni Scanlan as Highsmith is glorious: snappy, curmudgeonly, hilariously acerbic until a certain familiarity about her visitor encourages a pathos-inducing vulnerability.
Laurence Boxhall as Edward is magnificent. Initially playing a terrific comic balance between the awkwardness and confidence of youth, Boxhall gradually, and mesmerizingly, morphs the character into something grippingly different.
It’s a joy to watch two consummate actors do such masterful work.
Now, the end. Don’t worry, there’ll be no spoilers – because I didn’t really understand the end. (Or, at least, it sent me out into the darkness alight with questions.)
But that fourth idea? Teasingly offered for our consideration is the relation between the writer’s created world and their reality. By extension, it’s a tantalising invitation to ask ourselves Does our vision of the world actually create our world?
Paul Gilchrist
Switzerland by Joanna Murray-Smith
At Ensemble until 8 June
Image by Brett Boardman
Theatre Red 