Nigel Hastings, Natalie Simpson and James Corrigan in Visit From An Unknown Woman, credit Marc BrennerA handsome, charismatic writer moves into an apartment, triggering fascination and (over time), romantic notions in an adolescent girl who occupies a nearby apartment with her mother. As years pass-by, the man who we learn has many friends and lovers, encounters the girl on various occasions but it takes a tragic event for her to finally come to him to pour-out the previously unspoken but long and obsessive attachment she has held for him, and her sadness that he has never recognised her on previous encounters.
This slight and semi-believable premise requires the audience to accept that the man is some sort of womanising bohemian with such a poor memory for faces, that he is shamed by his own manservant (who recognises the young woman from one visit). The Don Juan angle is undermined further by setting the piece vaguely between the wars in Vienna and characterising him as a non-practising, but harassed Jew. In point of fact, whilst these devices don’t seem to play especially well on the stage, they bear a remarkably strong resemblance to Zweig’s own experience, causing him to flee Austria as the Nazi’s strengthened their grip on Central Europe.
Hampton has undoubtedly produced a considerable canon of cerebral and evocative work worthy of note over the years, but this is far from his best. A slight play at most, which doesn’t seem to have settled on what it is trying to say, and instead deploys bunches of white roses to act as a metaphor for the many years which elapse — even to the point of incorporating a mound of them stage left in Rosanna Vize’s plain and perfunctory set, where they act as some sort of monument to sadness and unrequited love.
After much anticipation, this reviewer was left underwhelmed and slightly disappointed by the production. How much more interesting would it have been perhaps, had Hampton toyed with Zweig’s altogether more promising ship-bound gladiatorial piece involving chess players, The Royal Game. Perhaps we’ll yet discover that he is working on exactly such an adaptation. Fingers crossed.
Directed by Chelsea Walker, the cast includes Natalie Simpson, James Corrigan, Nigel Hastings and Jessie Gattward.
