Dark blast from the past

The Woman Before confirms Roland Schimmelpfennig's status as a dramatist of provocative originality. This German playwright has fashioned a theatrical style all his own. His new play functions as a horrifying revenge drama, a study of female obsession, a black comedy of male faithlessness and a warning parable about the fragility of the marriage-bond. Strangeness strikes at once.

A woman called Romy, played by Helen Baxendale as if frostily detached from reality, knocks at an apartment door. She reminds Frank, who opens it, that 20 years earlier he promised to love her for ever. Now, like Ibsen's heroine in When We Dead Awaken, she returns to reclaim him. Unfortunately, Frank is hardpressed to remember Romy at all, let alone their love, and is thoroughly married with a teenage son, Andi.

Schimmelpfennig treats this mad situation and madder visitor in dead-pan seriousness, moderating the comic-realist tone and imposing a sense of dreamy reverie about the play. Romy, when shown the door, remains outside it.

When Andi carries her back, injured in a weird stone-throwing incident for which he bears responsibility, the normal, real-world thing to would be to call an ambulance. Not so here. Romy stays the night in the apartment. This is just the first of the oddnesses. Richard Wilson's admirably nuanced and low-key production ensures, however, that the actors do not resort to histrionics that would crudely underlie the weirdness of these people.

The structure of The Woman Before also depends upon the serious games that Schimmelpfennig plays with time, in the process disrupting any steady, linear advance. He backtracks minutes or days, jumps forward and then retreats a little, lets us see how the recent past bleeds to into the present.

The effect is joltingly strange. Some scenes even repeat snatches of what has been said before, as if to remind us of the way we have of mentally replaying significant scenes in which we were involved.

The play's narrative threads are tautly drawn together. The marriage lines of faith and love are broken as Frank, whom Nigel Lindsay makes the model of bovine inscrutability, turns from Saskia Reeves's haughty, hostile, hubristic wife and is almost lost to the fanatical Romy. The visitor's shockingly ingenious revenge on the family is in Greek tragedy mode. It lets us peer into the heart of darkness.

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The Woman Before