The River is the most conspicuous Emperor’s
New Clothes event I’ve seen in quite a
while. It comes with the pedigree of Jerusalem playwright Jez Butterworth and Hugh
Jackman in the lead role, Ian
Rickman as director…and leaves you
feeling…
Well,
what. I can’t tell you I wasn’t in the presence of an alert and highly
responsive audience…but I think that was about the pedigree, and the
level of production and performance, which is, of course, fine and
import-from-Londonworthy. But the play itself? I asked my companion of the
evening if I had missed something; she was wondering if she had. I asked a critic colleague I trust much, but
with whom I don’t routinely agree, the same question; his response was that the only thing I missed was
whatever I might have been doing instead of watching The River, which he categorized as “the most boring play of the
decade.” And while I won’t go quite that far, I will say I don’t think it’s much more than an attenuated shaggy
dog story: a long-winded anecdote that leads to a meaningless punch line.
The
only way to particularize that is to risk entering The Land of Spoilers. I’ll
try my level best not to tip everything, but there’s so little to protect that
any detailing risks spilling the beans. Or in this case the bean.
The
Man (Hugh Jackman), an outdoorsy type,
has brought his girlfriend The Woman (Cush Jumbo), who seems not terribly outdoorsy, to his cabin in
the woods by the river of the title, for some serious fishing (of several
varieties). At certain moments The Woman goes off and The Other Woman (Laura
Donnelly), also his girlfriend, comes on
and we realize that, shades of Alan Ayckbourn, we’re watching two separate
romantic relationships, occurring during separate timelines, being played out
simultaneously. As each relationship gets more intimate, it also becomes more
fraught with foreboding, spiritual and, we think, maybe-maybe, a bit physical
too. It becomes clearer that a pattern is being played out. What we don’t know
is, in the chronology, are these women #1 and #2? Has there been a woman or
women before? What is all this leading to?
And
here’s the thing.
The
play never tells us. Like some eerie short story with Henry James-type
ambitions, it doesn’t define the reality, but leaves it open to interpretation,
reinforcing only that the pattern has a template and may recur.
Now I’m not saying The River intends to be a horror story or a psychological thriller; I honestly don’t know, it plays its cards that close to the vest. But in Stephen King’s treatise on horror writing, Danse Macabre, he wrote this: “[T]he
simple fact of horror fiction in whatever medium you choose…the bedrock
of horror fiction, we might say, is simply this: you gotta scare the
audience. Sooner or later you gotta put on the gruesome mask and go
booga-booga. The [audience] will not feed forever on innuendo and
vapors; sooner or later even the great H. P. Lovecraft had to produce
whatever was lurking in the crypt or in the steeple.”
Playwright
Jez Butterworth never goes there. It is of course an often uniquely
theatrical technique to preserve aspects of ambiguity—Harold Pinter, to
name but one, built his entire career on it. But The River
is too specific in all its other regards—setting, characterization,
dialogue, propping (a very large knife used for chopping vegetables
and scoring a fish for cooking, is given way too much stage time to be
regarded as innocuous. It doesn’t claim the territory of ambiguity; it doesn’t earn permission to remain aloof. It teases with the promise of answers.
Which it then steadfastly refuses to deliver.
Tell
me it’s intended as an atmospheric tone poem, I’ll say all right, fair
enough; but then we enter the moodscape of writers like Jonathan
Carroll. He builds his terrors very quietly, slowly-slowly moving
you down the path to your destination and it isn’t until you’re right
there that you realize you’re trapped in a web. But it’s still a
destination; you get the endgame.
Same, in a way, applies to the performances. Since there can be no catharsis of revelation in The River,
none of the roles can be a tour de force, particularly not Jackman’s
and he’s the in-demand name above the title—and has proven that he
deserves to be; he has that kind of flair and insistence. And yet…while he’s perfectly fine, as are the two ladies, under the direction of Ian Rickman, he just doesn’t have to be there; not in the way that Mark Rylance had to be there for Jerusalem, Butterworth’s last Broadway outing; or in the way that Lee J. Cobb had to be there for Death of a Salesman; or Walter Matthau had to be there for The Odd Couple…and
etc. Jackman’s presence is just not necessary,. Nor can anything he
brings to the party, no matter how nuanced and particular, mark the
role as indelibly his own. Any decently charismatic leading man would
be as effective.
Go to David Spencer's Profile
Return to Home Page