‘The details will be different, but it will happen to you.’ Actually, it has probably already happened to most people sitting in the audience of the Lyttelton, but not quite so punishingly as is described here. ‘It’ is the death of someone close to you, and in her book of the same title Joan Didion wrote of the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, while her daughter, Quintana, was in a coma. Quintana recovered, but shortly after the book was published, she suffered a relapse and died. In this one-woman dramatisation by Didion, that devastating second death has been incorporated.
Despite the subject matter, David Hare’s production doesn’t require a box of tissues, mainly because Didion refuses to wallow in emotion, but rather describes as accurately as she can the moment her husband collapsed and how ‘the frame freezes’. The demands of her daughter make it too hard to come to terms with the death of her husband. She has the authority of a member of the NY wealthy literati, and yet is at the mercy of events beyond her control.
When Didion is played by Vanessa Redgrave, the piece is transformed in that the writer chooses her words almost coolly, while the performer is all emotional immediacy. That’s what makes her so watchable although you feel the contradiction. A tall, elegant figure in white and beige, she contrasts the pain of the present with memories of a family life by the sea, living in Malibu and Honolulu, recalled in the watery backcloths designed by Bob Crowley, which fall one by one. The piece gets too literary at the end and is occasionally dwarfed by the Lyttelton Theatre, but it’s admirable for its resolute look at a subject matter that is usually either hidden away or drowned in hysteria.
