The Old Woman

What do ‘Sex and the City’’s prince charming Aleksandr Petrovsky and the Green Goblin have in common? No need to look beyond Paris for the answer: the two (or rather their respective actors) have been brought together in a new production of the absurdist Soviet playwright Daniil Kharms’s ‘The Old Woman’. Willem Dafoe and dancer Mikhaïl Barychnikov are almost unrecognisable in this tale of a writer tormented by the figure of an old woman he dreams of killing. Under Bob Wilson’s assured direction, the production comes alive in splashes of luminous light and stark carnivalesque makeup – a striking aesthetic for a haunting play.