If you knew nothing about it beforehand and were led into a theatre to see Robert Shearman’s tragi-comic two-hander White Lies performed in French in the guise of a long-lost play by Eugène Ionesco, it might have registered as an absurdist drama in the modernist style, which is really what it is, in Shearman’s sparkling English script.
Maybe it’s that hatstand, one of the few props in Lighthouse Theatre’s touring production by Nancy Ellis in her full-scale directing début and ubiquitous in all the Swansea company’s shows so far. Ionesco would have loved it and the idea of employing it, like the eponymous chairs of his 1952 play. In fact, Ionesco’s The Chairs focuses on a couple organising the seats for a crowd of invisible guests; White Lies is about a married couple, Claire and Simon, who have invented an invisible guest, Roger, to give their moribund married lives some meaning.
Shearman’s scenario is as heart-rending as it’s absurd, though fifteen years of marriage must have been crushingly uneventful for Claire and Simon to have given in to fantasy so early – well, relatively early. One could almost believe that it was some kinky diversion to keep a dull marriage alive, the kinkiness always triumphing over the tedium. And it is tedious: Claire seems to do nothing but hoover and shop, shop and hoover, and Simon’s workaday world is leavened only by sweaty squash court sessions in the evening. Routine is all, even down to the weekly dinner invitation to the non-existent Roger.
The premise is not only that Claire and Simon have nothing much to say to each other but that their capacity for making friends beyond their doorstep has also shrivelled. Were Roger real, of course, absurdity would have given way to reality, but we’d probably have been offered a less farcical and entertaining night at the theatre. The dilemmas belong to Claire and Simon, not to Roger.
Polly Kilpatrick and Richard Nichols
Richard Nichols as Simon and Polly Kilpatrick as Claire cleave superbly and stoically to Shearman’s view that the cause of the couple’s malaise lies within their walls – a panoply of layered sheets on Ellie Reynolds’s softly-lit, minimalist set. That involved concealing it in make-believe: a kind of actorly double-bind. It’s almost as if Simon knows that in his daily leave-taking he is deserting the place and the person where and with whom his problem with conjugal union might be solved. For her part, Claire has the one-act domestic focus to herself, deciding to conduct a Marcel Marceau-type affair with Roger behind Simon’s back. Simon, for his part, is shown not at the office but at the squash court, where he’s dressed to maim with a wildly-wielded racquet and where his talk about the game is more convincing than his lumbering style of play. He practises alone and communes with Roger, a sight that clearly irritates, not to say frightens, the non-absurdist players waiting to use the court.
Nichols is strong on ineffectual male engagement, Kilpatrick on sympathetic distaff victimhood, but Ellis’s direction, a spirited affair, is not able to detect in Shearman’s text any suspicion that Simon and Claire are equally culpable for their rift; no director could. Inevitably, though, it is Kilpatrick who has the lioness’s share of opportunities to bring matters to a head, with her vividly enacted dream of congress with the presumably priapic Roger, while Nichols invests this one-act play with more physicality than such a form possibly deserves.
Shearman lapses only in opting for a melodramatic, happy ending. The absurd concludes by not being absurd; but one does wonder, when Claire and Simon are in the clinches, who is ringing the front-door bell that used to be invented to admit the invented persona of Roger, that figment of their desperate imaginations. Maybe the dorbell ringing was an imagined desideratum heralding the visit of someone real after so much pretence.
The company’s tour continues:
Monday 1st June – 7.30pm, Ferryside Village Hall; Tuesday 2nd June – 7.45pm, Aberystwyth Arts Centre Studio; Wednesday 3rd June 7.45pm – Aberystwyth Arts Centre Studio;Thursday 4th June – 7.30pm, Middleton Village Bunk House, Rhossili; Friday 5th June – 7pm, Blaengarw Workmen’s Hall; Saturday 6th June – 12.30pm and 7.30pm, Arts Wing, Grand Theatre, Swansea; Tuesday 9th June – 7.30pm, Pontio, Bangor; Wednesday 10th June – 7pm, Maesteg Town Hall; Thursday 11th June – 7.30pm, Blackwood Miner’s Institute Studio; Friday 12th June – 7.30pm, Neaudd Dwyfor, Pwllheli; Saturday 13th June – 7.30pm, Canolfan Ucheldre, Holyhead; Monday 15th June – 7.30pm, Stepni Stiwdio, FFwrnes, Llanelli; Tuesday 16th June – 7.30pm, Mwldan, Cardigan; Wednesday 17th June – 7.30pm, Y Glowyr, Ammanford; Thursday 18th June – 7.30pm, Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon; Friday 19th June – 7.30pm, The Welfare, Ystradgynlais; Saturday 20th June – 7.30pm, Neath Little Theatre.
Nigel Jarrett is a Welsh writer, a former newspaperman, and a winner of the Rhys Davies Prize and the Templar Award, both for short fiction. He’s had nine books published, including two poetry collections, a novel, a fictional memoir, and four collections of short stories. Last year, Cockatrice Books of north Wales published his Never Lost for Words: Selected Essays.