I’m going a little off piste in my blog this week, exploring the psyche through theatre, prompted by the coincidence of seeing two plays in which the characters’ inner thoughts are presented alongside the words they speak out loud.
Passion Play by Peter Nichols and staring Zoe Wanamaker and Samantha Bond is an exploration of adultery in which both husband and wife are each played by two actors, one representing the surface – what they actually say – and the other actor speaking the thoughts and feelings they keep hidden.
Although some may find this a theatrical contrivance, for me it is a powerful and ingenious way to explore the splits and struggles within each character. As Charles Spencer says his review “This may sound tricksy but it works superbly, to both comic and emotionally devastating effect. At the start of the affair, for instance, James returns home and tells his wife that he has missed her. But Jim, his alter ego, delivers rather different words as he thinks of his lunchtime date: “Her tongue straight to the back of my mouth, circling like a snake inside”.
In the second half, the lines between the inner and outer roles seem to shift and blur as what began as commentary develops into a complex exploration of turmoil, desire and pain.
Strange Interlude by Eugene O’Neill, starring Anne Marie Duff and Jason Watkins at the National Theatre, is rather different. In this play the actors speak their character’s inner and outer words, differentiating between the two by where they are looking – either at the people they are with, or out into the audience, like a traditional ‘aside’.
I notice that O’Neil makes his characters speak both the thoughts they are conscious of – e.g. sarcastic remarks or silent protests (often very funny) as well as verbalising the rushes of feeling that spring directly from their subconscious – powerful feelings they have been conditioned to swallow for social reasons.
Nina, the main character in Strange Interlude, is totally at sea with her emotions as she tries to do her duty, putting others first, whilst struggling with desire. It is she who speaks the title line of the play: “The only living life is in the past and future — the present is an interlude — strange interlude in which we call on past and future to bear witness that we are living.” This tragic idea seems key O’Neill, and he also explores it elsewhere, for example in ‘A Moon for the Misbegotten’: “There is no present or future, only the past, happening over and over again, now.”
And this is where I feel O’Neill – and Nina – could have used some hypnotherapy! I know from my own experiences that we can never be truly happy until we learn to live in the present. What went before will have an impact on our feelings, but it is when feelings are trapped that they become powerful, distorting and overwhelming. By learning to release and accept these feelings, our life energy can start to flow freely, and by practicing mindfulness we stop looking to the past and future and learn to enjoy the present.
So I agree with O’Neill when he says in ‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’: “None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it…” But he continues “…and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.” Its true – many people do stagger along on auto pilot, but it doesn’t have to be that way. As human beings we have something that other animals don’t have – a complex brain and the capacity for ‘meta’ thinking which we can learn to use to our advantage. We have the capacity to learn programming, cleaning out the hard drive, rebooting and installing new apps that will make everything run more smoothly and happily…
By the way, both plays are wonderful, with superb acting – do see them if you can.
