Night leaves a chill

When The Night begins is my idea of a theatrical nightmare. You sit trapped in the auditorium for 90 minutes without an interval. You are required to watch two highly talented actors, Catherine McCormack and Michael Pennington, valiantly and vainly trying to breathe a little life into a psychological thriller by Hanif Kureishi that has no more dramatic vitality than a beached whale and never thrills.

When the handsome Miss McCormack, as the rich, emotionally disturbed young widow Jane, draws a huge knife from her handbag and holds it inches away from Michael Pennington, who plays a retired bus driver unbelievably called Cecil, the tension rises just a couple of degrees on the theatrical barometer to lukewarm.

Kureishi, famous for his novel The Buddha Of Suburbia and his films My Beautiful Laundrette and The Mother, is an uneven playwright, whose last play, Sleep With Me, was abused by almost every critic apart from me.

On this occasion, though, his work leaves me cold. When The Night Begins sporadically attempts to grapple with enduring psychological problems caused by sexual abuse of the adolescent.

The play simply allows two small, narrow streams of consciousness to flow with sluggish, slow abandon across the stage and back again - and again. These two streams, representing the abuser and the abused, never really meet or connect. There is no serious conflict or engagement between Jane and Cecil, who long ago became her substitute father, her sexual abuser and her hippy mother's lover.

The past does, of course, rear its ugly, damaged head but only just an inch or so. The scene is Cecil's Streatham council flat into which Miss McCormack's compelling Jane, who shimmers with nerves, suppressed rage and vulnerability, arrives with murder ostensibly in mind and that knife at the ready.

There is, though, the faint, persisting impression that the emotional ties between abuser and buser have never quite been broken. Before anything violent is contemplated Jane treats us to a lengthy voyage down her memory lane, while Cecil acts as her helpful stooge. "Brilliant man. Lived a fulfilled life," he says of her now dead husband, the famous film director. "What was he, 18 years older than you? Remind me how you got to know him... What did Bernard leave you?"

This artificial method of providing us with boring, mainly irrelevant information is the play's governing characteristic. The fashion in which both Jane and Cecil tell stories about their lives serves to prevent the clash and clamour of recrimination. Miss McCormack's Jane, all baleful in funereal black, keeps reminiscing about herself in the self-absorbed style of the practising narcissist.

Since she is a successful artist, has been reunited with her mother and begun a new relationship, the inference that her life has been ruined by Cecil's exploitative sexual abuse rings untrue. There is though insufficient evidence for us to judge.

Kureishi's dialogue veers between the odd, affected and pseudo poetic. Both the versatile actors, in Anthony Clark's sensitive production, deftly bear the heavy burden of Kureishi's style and an unresolved, plot-lite narrative.