Better on page than on stage

Don't go to this one-woman monologue expecting a rehash of Joan Didion’s book. You’ll be disappointed if you do. Having twice read The Year of Magical Thinking — Didion’s account of her life in the 12 months after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, suddenly dropped dead from a massive heart attack and during which her adopted daughter Quintana suffered debilitating illness — I confess I was really looking forward to a moving re-enactment and another opportunity for a good, cathartic blub. As it was, I came away dry-eyed, handkerchief untouched.

The strength of the book lay in Didion’s idiosyncratic neurotic style, loop to the point of unhinged vacillating, one moment seeking and finding rational medical explanations for what had happened to her husband, the next declaring she couldn’t throw out his shoes in case he came back.

This was a book to linger over; whose pages you would flip back and forth, to re-read sentences, for it spoke powerfully to the bereaved.

By Didion’s own admission, this David Hare-directed, 90-minute stage adaptation is "a different animal in every possible way" and, like most abridgements, it suffers.

She has rightly included the death, in August 2005, almost two years after her husband’s, of Quintana, but she has had to exclude much of her own colourful history, her early days with John, of Quintana growing up and, essentially that sense of having spent 40 years with one other person.

Vanessa Redgrave, statuesque and chic in silk, seems miscast as Didion. I was unconvinced by her accent, a low and gravelly kind of mid-Atlantic drawl. The words spew out of her in disjointed bursts, punctuated by melodramatic silences, stares, gestures and the occasional tearful outburst.

In the book, Didion is mad with grief; here, some of her lines come over as tragic-comic gags — more comic than tragic — raising sympathetic laughs from the audience. It felt all wrong; I wanted to be crying, but not with mirth.

In rep until 15 May

The Year Of Magical Thinking
National Theatre: Lyttelton
South Bank, SE1 9PX