A slow production of a well-acted play by Brecht.
There is some superb acting in Matthew Evan's production of Bertolt Brecht's The Jewish Wife currently playing at Battersea Arts Centre. Kristin Hutchinson, playing Judith, packs up her belongings and makes final phone calls to friends as she prepares to leave her Aryan husband Fritz. She embodies a long buried anxiety slowly spilling over the surface and is matched brilliantly by Mark Lockyer playing the practical Fritz who, though worried, isn't all that surprised she's leaving.
Between the straight-laced wife and the emotionally stunted husband, Hutchinson and Lockyer display an intimate but unspoken knowledge of one another in an excellent, moving depiction of the raw end of a marriage. Judith can predict exactly what her husband won't say, which reveals more than anything he does.
A series of phone calls to her friends and in-laws makes Judith's impending exit that much harder to take. She's not particularly dynamic and probably won't be missed all that much, but nonetheless, she's venturing into the frightening unknown, leaving behind the life she's created for herself . In her endlessly polite and caring way, she prepares to exit with as little upheaval as possible.
Despite great performances, the play's downfall is its staging and pace. It moves too slowly from the start when Hutchinson performs some dark piano pieces for us. The songs are linked in subject to the play but they're performed so entirely separately to the rest of the production that this musical beginning fails to segue into the first scene. This might be down to it being staged in the busy foyer of the BAC, where it's difficult to set any kind of mood with so much going on.
We're led to the performance area through dark corridors lined with piles of anonymous shoes, up a dark staircase where we watch as small groups of us are told to enter a brightly lit, haze-filled room. This would be effective if we weren't left to our own devices for so long. The corridor, though a little eerie and harking back to well-known images of the holocaust, fails to stun us into silence. Audience members stand around talking, waiting to get to the performance area and it's only after we're seated that I start to think about what just happened. As it's a production of a Brecht play, this might be exactly what Evans is trying to achieve, but it feels too segmented.
The performance area itself is simple, as expected, but it's huge with a visible computer working lights and sound toward the back. Coming from such an atmospheric introduction to a vacant set with so many distractions throws any hope of intensity out the window. The audience sit on three sides but the action takes place all over. There's no sense of different rooms, or space restrictions. In this sense, the staging fails to support the actors. Judith doesn't appear physically trapped but we know her leaving arises from a need to escape. Details of the performance are lost. Restless fingers and sad eyes aren't so noticeable in a big space. Having said that, the production could be considered fitting to a Brecht script, as Mark Evans' production of this short play encourages the audience to think – rather than simply leading us by the hand through a series of emotions.
The Jewish Wife runs at Battersea Arts Centre until 14th August
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