Young love's bitter Dispute

Neil Bartlett has unearthed a little masterpiece of mid-eighteenth century French comedy by Marivaux that reminds us how wild oats are inevitably sown in every new Garden of Eden. The Dispute, in Bartlett's own fluent translation and riveting production, conjures up a chilling scenario and then plays psychological games with it. First seen and admired in February at the Royal Shakespeare Company's small studio theatre, The Other Place, the comedy now opens up and out on the Lyric's proscenium stage.

Marivaux's idea is to show how erotic love blooms and bursts out in four late teenagers. There's nothing unusual about that. But the playwright, in an eerie though benevolent premonition of Nazi social experimenting, scales the heights of novelty. His young quartet, each one of whom has been reared in total isolation with only two black servants to nurture them, are loosed from the ornamental folly housing them. A prince and his debauched, voyeuristic entourage, whom Bartlett conceives as 1930s minor, masked aristocrats in fancy dress, watch these innocents catch up on sex and love in a flawed Eden where peacocks and egos call for attention.

With Bartlett's own stage set, consisting of a grey, prison-like house, and Paule Constable's abruptly shifting patterns of light, a strange, dream-like mood is cast. In 20 brief scenes and 90 minutes, Marivaux shrinks the growing-up process almost to the rushed slur of a fast-forwarded video. First there are incidents of beautiful, humorous strangeness as Hayley Carmichael's sentimental tomboy Egle, discovers narcissism by way of a puddle. Then drooling over Martin Freeman's Azor she tentatively gropes her way to the brave new world of eros and gender. Sadly though, Miss Carmichael strands her character's complex, emotional, sexual journey in a cul de sac of raucous bawling.

The arrival of Charlotte Randle's delectable Adine and John Padden's Mesrin bring duplicity, jealousy, rivalry and love's breakdown in their wake. What heartfelt, dark comedy Marivaux makes of this parable of the sour fruits of knowledge eaten in Eden.

The Dispute