WHOSE DEATH IS IT ANYWAY? The Broadway cast of “The Height of the Storm” (from left, Lucy Cohu, Eileen Atkins, Amanda Drew, Jonathan Pryce and Lisa O’Hare). After a couple’s half-century of love, laughter and marriage, what would happen if he died — or if she did?
THEIR NAMES ARE André and Madeleine. They have been married for 50 years. He is a famous writer who now suffers from Alzheimer’s. Actually, either he or his wife may be deceased. From moment to moment, the answer to the question “Which one?” seems to change.
The play, by the Molière Award winner Florian Zeller (which is why all the characters have French names and talk so often about driving into Paris), was an enormous success on the West End in 2018. The Guardian named it the production of the year, and The Times of London called it “a deeply moving new play that takes us to the edge of what is to love.”
ALTERNATIVE FACTS Madeleine (Atkins), sharing a tender moment with her husband (Pryce), has just bought mushrooms at the market. Or picked them from the vegetable garden. Or — and this is the big one — she looks remarkably well for a woman who was buried on Saturday.
Last month (the Broadway production opened on Sept. 24), Jesse Green of The New York Times was far less impressed. He complained of “thin insights” and — although he professed to admire the play as a “juicy acting exercise” for its acclaimed British stars, Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins — concluded, “There’s no there there.”
MOD LONDONER Eileen Atkins in an undated photograph. She was a co-creator of the series “Upstairs, Downstairs” and made her Broadway debut in “The Killing of Sister George” in 1966.
My press-night guest, AS, whose husband is in his 80s and has had a couple of medical close calls, found loads of there there and said she loved the final scene with the couple at their kitchen table. I agree with her, even though I’ve been having a lot of trouble lately with when and when not to take things literally.
But first, quickly:
Everyone (even Jesse Green) agrees that “The Height of the Storm” is a thing of physical beauty. The scenic design, by Anthony Ward, shows us a windowed country kitchen with pale blue walls flowing into a sitting room with a comfy chair and towering bookshelves. Thanks to Hugh Vanstone, the lighting designer, it always looks as if the sun is just rising or setting —or will very soon, the shadows and the beams of light intermingling.
Ah, maybe that’s the theme — improbable, precious co-existence. When André’s daughter Ann (Amanda Drew) tells him, “You can’t live in this place on your own” and “When there were two of you, it was still viable,” it is manifestly clear that André is alive and Madeleine is dead.
But a little later, Madeleine, considering the posthumous publication of André’s papers, asks herself, “What would he have wanted?” and Ann recalls, “Towards the end, he was still writing a lot.” So the exact opposite is true, at least for the moment.
THE ENGINEER. Jonathan Pryce, back in 1991, in his show-stopping number, “The American Dream,” in “Miss Saigon.”
The playwright seems to be saying: Relax. It could happen either way. It could have happened either way. It will happen, one way or the other. Take a deep breath. Go with it.
Yet it took me half the length of the performance to do just that. Green had a similar problem, and it made him angry (“By the end, it’s not so much that you don’t know who died as that you don’t care”).
A STUNT MAN AND HIS STAR Brad Pitt, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”
I blame my good friend DK, who had just left New York after a weeklong visit. Not long ago, DK saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” which takes place in 1969, just before the Manson-Tate murders in Los Angeles. DK said she didn’t understand why everyone else loved the movie so much.
THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS INCLUDE MAJOR MOVIE SPOILERS. IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN “ONCE UPON A TIME,” PLEASE SKIP TO “PAINFULLY LITERAL.”
