Triptych

by Edna O'Brien

April 9th 2008 - May 10th 2008

Show starts: 7.30pm (3pm Saturday matinees)
Running time: 90 minutes

"Sean Mathias's brilliantly animated production... Terry Norton stages a mesmerising emotional striptease of a performance"
Evening Standard

"Jessica Ellerby makes an impressive professional debut"
The Stage

"No shortage of panache"
Time Out

A wife, a mistress and a daughter circumnavigate a husband, a lover and a father in a poignant study of love and obsession. Triptych is a lyrical portrait of a man seen through the eyes of his three women, seamlessly exploring sex, marriage and damaged relationships where love can both liberate and entrap.

Following his acclaimed production of Ring Round the Moon, award winning director, Sean Mathias directs this new production of Triptych at Southwark Playhouse.

Triptych boasts an international cast featuring Orla Brady (recently seen in the BBC’s Mistresses); Terry Norton, reprising her award-nominated role of The Wife (in Sean’s recent production at South Africa’s Market Theatre); and newcomer Jessica Ellerby.

Edna O’Brien has been a leading figure in Irish literature for more than four decades. Described as a ‘poet of heartbreak’ her first novel, The Country Girls created a scandal when it was published in 1960 for its vivid exposition of two girls growing up in rural Ireland.

"Sean Mathias's smouldering production..."
The Guardian

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Creative Team

Director	- Sean Mathias
Designer	- Paul Burgess
Lighting Designer	- Katharine Williams

Cast

The Wife	- Terry Norton
The Mistress	- Orla Brady
The Daughter	- Jessica Ellerby

Reviews

In her significant career as a novelist Edna O’Brien has both crested the tides of feminism and ignored its currents, revealing with uncomfortable candour how some women in love take the masochist’s role. Her female protagonists tend to be enthralled by men’s thinking and unthinking parts. It comes, therefore, as no surprise that in Triptych, one of her rare excursions into theatre, O’Brien distils a lifetime’s observation of men behaving badly.

Her play does suffer from the triteness of its format and exposition. Yet it transcends these limitations, thanks to Miss O’Brien’s ability to give eloquent voice to sexual jealousy, to Sean Mathias’s brilliantly animated production and Terry Norton’s astonishing performance as a woman who reaches the end of her tether and hangs on in there.

A wife, Pauline, and Brandy, teenage daughter of Henry, a never-seen novelist famed for his books and freelance leching, are presented in streams of revelatory consciousness. These streams turn turbulent whenever the women engineer meetings with Henry’s mistress, Clarissa, a promising actress for whom very few of Henry’s promises come true.

Miss O’Brien does luxuriate in her characters’ opulent high-life as if such lifestyles were inherently interesting. All those holiday retreats, parties, taxis and therapists are detailed without ironical intent. Pauline’s intrusions into Clarissa’s dressing-room beggar belief as, somewhat, does Jessica Ellerby’s daddy-adoring, deflowered, heroin-trying Brandy.

Yet Terry Norton’s sinuous Pauline, sometimes dressed in just a slip and a flimsy covering of self-control, stages a mesmerising emotional striptease of a performance. Raw and racked, beset by curses, howls and tears, eager to put Henry’s errant penis beyond working use, Pauline switches from child-like rage to superior, bitchy malice in the sight of Orla Brady’s handsome, languorous mistress, who shares the wife’s hopeless addiction to Henry. What a relief it is when he does the decent thing and drowns himself.

The scenes, in Mathias’s dynamic traverse-stage production, bolstered by Paul Burgess’s handsomely decked staging, are never reduced to statuesque, spotlit monologues, but flow seamlessly into each other with the ease of a nightmare.

3 Stars - Nicholas de Jongh

Evening Standard Read Full Review

Sometimes, in acting, you have to dump nuance at the door and just go for it: it’s what wins Daniel Day-Lewis Oscars and, on a smaller scale, it’s what Terry Norton does in this production of Edna O’Brien’s Triptych. Norton, Jessica Ellerby and Orla Brady play the wife, the daughter and the mistress of one invisible, fascinating man, Henry, each going mad in the fight for his attention. Really, bunny-boilingly mad. Norton has the juiciest role as the wife, a leggy monster with zero self-restraint. In fact, if there is a thespian motif, with The Duchess of Malfi and As You Like It woven in, the main thoughts here are still a) hell hath no fury, and b) women beware women. Sometimes you wish the actresses had better costume and sound; sometimes that the daughter should be played by a younger actress, one more obviously in her teens. But they certainly keep the audience entertained by a text that can be melodramatic – if not forced. Not quite Jacobean, but certainly a jaunt.

3 Stars - Louis Wise

The Sunday Times Read Full Review

Nothing new under the sun, especially in matters of love, but there’s no shortage of panache at least in this triple portrait of wife, mistress and daughter, all whirling chaotically around the void of the Great Man in their lives. The man – Henry, a celebrated playwright – is not shown, though he’s there in a pair of massive backdrops hung half-hidden at either end of the stage in Sean Mathias’s production. Instead we get wife Pauline (Terry Norton) bursting in on Clarissa (Orla Brady) in her dressing room, minutes before she is due onstage as the Duchess of Malfi, brandishing a bunch of sunflowers as it were a shotgun, and determined to see off this latest threat to her domestic dominance.

Edna O’Brien’s play is more interested in emotional truth than realism, so the exchanges between the women – and their lush, flighty monologues – take fairly frequent holidays from the kind of things people actually say. Some of the most powerful moments are the quietest, as when Pauline stumbles home drunk to find her teenage daughter Brandy (Jessica Ellerby) sprawled on the floor, coked-up and cooing to her lover.

It’s rather clumsy to begin with, but the production grows in strength as Pauline and Clarissa pick away at each other’s neuroses. Norton’s portrayal of a woman driven to shameless lengths to keep her man, pretty much unwatchable at the start, becomes increasingly engrossing, while Brady is engrossing from the word go. At just 90 minutes, it’s an effective psychological vignette.

3 Stars - Jonathan Gibbs

Time Out Read Full Review

You know a household is awry when a teenage girl asks: "Mummy, what is love?" and her mother replies: "Ask your father. Ask his whore." Edna O'Brien's new play stabs itself on the lethal points of a love triangle and gazes, pleased, as blood drips. We first meet Clarissa, an actor, backstage preparing to perform as the Duchess of Malfi: it's a not-so-subtle indication of the uncontrollable passions that will seize O'Brien's characters as the story unfolds.

Clarissa is the mistress, Pauline the wife, and Henry the celebrated playwright over whom they claw and weep. In a spicy variation on this ancient theme, O'Brien shows how Henry and Pauline's daughter, Brandy, finds her father as bewitching as the others, clinging to the memory of a holiday in New York, when people regarded them "as if we were lovers". His drift from the family home sends Brandy spiralling towards drink and drugs. Meanwhile, Pauline becomes a devoted housewife, concocting elaborate meals, and Clarissa loses her job, and almost her mind, when Henry forces her to abort their child by accusing her of being just like his previous mistresses.

We never meet Henry; instead, the stricken face of Caravaggio's Goliath glares down at the women from each end of the traverse stage. Perhaps it's just as well: no real man could live up to the exalted image these deluded women paint of him.

Sean Mathias's smouldering production ignites whenever Terry Norton's swaggering, serrated Pauline clashes with Orla Brady's composed, helpless Clarissa. Ultimately, though, it's difficult to care for women who waste their best selves on a self-important, selfish man who deserves none of them.

2 Stars - Maddy Costa

The Guardian Read Full Review

Triptych, directed by Sean Mathias, shows the effects of a married man's affair on his daughter, mistress, and wife, the man appearing only as a huge pair of eyes glowering at each end of the traverse stage.

Although the mistress's language is less gynecological than the wife's, both are the Edna O'Brien woman par excellence – a martyr to her own sensuality, shrieking and wriggling on the cross.

Pauline (excellent Terry Norton) tells Clarissa (too- demure Orla Brady) that she has seen off previous lovers with her mature tolerance and deep knowledge of male psychology: "Every sensitive man loves two women, mamma mia and mamma whore." She says that, like the others, Clarissa will end up telephoning hysterically in the middle of the night, but Pauline and Henry will "snuggle up to each other in the dark, man and wife against the enemy outside." Not that Pauline can't be a scarlet woman, too – she has only to murmur, "I've never had to fake orgasm," and men leap on her, panting. But when Henry embraces Clarissa, she says, he "crushed my ribs so badly I had to wear a truss."

Henry leaves Pauline ("He is my life! My rock!") and their daughter, Brandy ("I'm his princess!"), who visits Clarissa and slaps her face. The mistress, however, has sorrows of her own: "When I told him, his face froze. He said: 'You've got to get rid of it.' Whenever I saw a mother and baby on the street, I burst into tears."

Pauline has a castration fantasy about Henry, which is symbolically fulfilled ("He's got a block"), and forces a kiss on Clarissa, who is strangely moved: "For one second I yielded. I was unfaithful to him with his own wife." Henry ditches both of them, but, while dallying with a third, is destroyed by the biggest female symbol of all: "The sea, the sea! His clothes on the bank, folded!"

Everything about this trite material – the sexual swagger, vindictiveness, masochism – speaks not only of the self-glorifying exhibitionism of the Sixties and Seventies but of an overwrought adolescent's desire to shock. Like such a teenager, Triptych cares less about being truthful than theatrical, but the play is too predictable and earnest to be either.

2 Stars - The Independent

The Independent Read Full Review

What is love? It may be an eternal question, but it is treated with tedious banality in this play by the Irish writer Edna O’Brien. Triptych, in which monologue and dialogue, like the characters’ lives, overlap, sees three women – a wife, a daughter and a mistress – caught up in a familiar competition for the attention of a philandering and self-regarding man.

The very concept is enough to make the eyes roll, and neither O’Brien’s text nor Sean Mathias’s production, both of which are obtrusively self-conscious – there’s even an admiring discussion of one of O’Brien’s short stories – bring any fresh insight to the hackneyed scenario.

Brittle, bitchy and embittered by years of betrayal at the hands of her writer husband, middle-aged Pauline stalks his latest flame, Clarissa, a glamorous young actress, relentlessly attempting to bully her into leaving the seemingly irresistible serial cheat alone. Back at home, Pauline’s daughter Brandy is embarrassed by her mother’s obsessive, increasingly drunken and provocative behaviour, and craves her daddy, around whom she weaves Freudian fantasies.

The cause of all this distress never appears, except in two huge, shadowy portraits that flank Paul Burgess’s set. As Pauline grows more boozily unhinged, Brandy embarks on an odyssey of sexual and narcotic experimentation. As Clarissa, under protest, aborts her baby, his only contribution is to spout, by all accounts, pseudo-poetic platitudes. It seems pretty clear that he is a feckless failure as lover, husband and father, and hardly worth fighting over.

Admittedly, in love we don’t always know what’s good for us. But reiterating that truism is hardly illuminating, and in attempting to raise the dramatic temperature O’Brien only ensures that her stew of clichés is overcooked. Orla Brady as Clarissa, Terry Norton as Pauline and Jessica Ellerby as Brandy are all competent, but the characterisation is so emaciated that we care nothing for any of them.

Irritating beyond belief.

2 Stars - Sam Marlowe

The Times Read Full Review

Irishwoman Edna O'Brien is well known as a novelist (The Country Girls and a score of other works) but, to date, has a limited reputation as a playwright. Despite the efforts of director Sean Mathias, Triptych is unlikely to persuade anyone that she should forsake the page for the stage.

The new Southwark Playhouse is warm and welcoming after its false start in a larger space for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. Mathias and designer Paul D. Burgess have adorned the long traverse with wooden triptychs at either end, backed by matching large portraits of a dark, soulful man, presumably the play's lacuna, Henry.

For 90 minutes, three women who love him wage war until they are united in the only way that ever seemed likely.

We are first introduced to pre-Raphaelite beauty Clarissa. Orla Brady, looking like a younger version of the writer, plays an actress who has fallen for playwright Henry while engaged as The Duchess of Malfi.

Her mysterious and hysterical visitor in the first scene turns out to be Henry's enraged wife, Pauline - South African actress Terry Norton rather overdoing the dramatics.

Her lead is followed by professional debutante Jessica Ellerby in the role of her spoilt 15 or so year old daughter Brandy. Originally a calming influence, eventually Daddy's chasing after every female and Mummy's drunken tantrums drive her to sex and drugs but ironically away from rock and roll.

The triumvirate circle around each other rather like boxers throwing out jabs but completely incapable of delivering a killer punch as the plotting becomes increasingly contrived.

With little dramatic action and a storyline far too close to a Mills and Boon with modern soft porn veneer, Triptych tells us little about the human condition and not enough about being a wronged woman.

Review by Philip Fisher (2008)

British Theatre Guide Read Full Review

Passions never rise as they might.

An unseen man links the three women in Edna O’Brien’s play. His fate is decided by a fourth, who stands outside the socially-conditioned, self-destructive behaviour which restrains these three. The man himself inspires the devotion of this trio, while seeming also to have his own artistic gift.

His mistress Clarissa is an actor, playing passionate classical roles – the Duchess of Malfi, As You Like It’s Rosalind (where she seems about to go onstage for her first scene already dressed as Ganymede). His wife Pauline stalks Clarissa, practised in techniques to see-off other women.

Daughter Brandy, a would-be musician ambitious to beat her own drum (and doing so in a couple of perfunctory percussive moments), longs for her father. All this is played out in the alternative, under-the-arches space of the new Southwark Playhouse, by London Bridge station. Designer Paul Burgess makes this space resemble the long nave of a church, audience ‘pews’ along each side, wooden screens at each end with a patriarchal painted figure partly-concealed behind.

Sometimes the concept helps, giving space for swishing entrances; at others the space becomes abstract, dissipating the concentrated arguments. It adds to a curiously low-key evening. For all the declarations of yearning and desire, all the emotional gaps Henry leaves or has made in these people’s lives, the damaging impact through which he’s sailed confidently on, there remains a lack of either fury or resolution.

It’s as if the fourth, unseen woman comes as a dea ex machina to sort things out on their behalf. Yet even this doesn’t lead to any final image of the three women’s states. There’s a dispassionate quality to the acting much of the time, given what’s being expressed in the words, and it’s left to costume to express Clarissa’s protean actor’s nature, Pauline’s dowdy attempts to keep her husband, and young Brandy exposing limbs and shoulders with the confidence of a youthful body even as she’s punishing it in her turmoil.

Ultimately, O’Brien’s script has a self-conscious element that keeps a sense of contrivance, of authorial shuffling from which the characters never escape into terrifying passionate life.

Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 April

Reviewsgate Read Full Review

First seen in San Francisco in 2003, Triptych, about three women all in love with the same man, now gets its English premiere, directed by Sean Mathias. He and designer Paul Burgess place it in a long and elegant room with a chequered wooden floor and panelled ends that simultaneously suggest a stately home, a chequeboard for playing a game and a conscious stage set. Behind the screens at either end are huge details of Caravaggio's self-portrait head of Goliath – a reminder of the man whom they all love, perhaps? (But why Goliath? Surely we are not intended to see these women as giant-killers.)

The play begins with actress Clarissa in her dressing room, dressed for The Duchess of Malfi, when a woman bursts in bearing flowers. She's a stranger, but Clarissa knows who she is: Pauline, her lover Henry's wife. Henry has habitually been unfaithful but Pauline knows he always comes back to her. This time she's not so confident. She increases her drinking, breaks down in tears, interrupts one of Clarissa's performances, and admits to her analyst that she is 'getting fond' of her jealousy.

Clarissa seems more balanced than Pauline, but she also loses her composure for a moment, slapping the face of the actress playing Celia to her Rosalind and having to retire from the show. When Henry learns that she is pregnant, he insists on an abortion.

Then there is daughter Brandy, who idolises her father, getting into drugs and alcohol to make up for the lack of parental attention, trying out sex and finding it a great disappointment.

We don't get all the nitty-gritty of Henry's relationships with these women, but the emotional backwash that we do get makes an engrossing piece of theatre. Indeed, theatricality abounds in this production, with a vase of flowers mysteriously falling from a table, bouquets, books and drum kits being thrown to the floor, candles being slowly lit, carefully placed and finally blown out – even a moment when the sound of a playing card being swept off a chair seems dramatically significant. And the play provides opportunities for some wonderful virtuoso acting.

Terry Norton, reprising the role of the wife which she played in the Market Theatre production in South Africa, also directed by Mathias, is magnificently seething and wonderfully drunk without losing her long-limbed elegance, and with a rawness underneath that is touching. Orla Brady, as the mistress, is more outwardly confident and calm – the actress Clarissa is of course more subtle in revealing her vulnerability until, at the end, she admits her desperate need for inclusion. Two stunning performances.

Jessica Ellerby's daughter is not so high-powered. Her part is not quite as well written, and her performance is often weakened by a lack of the vocal clarity and projection needed to match this wide traverse staging, although she she skilfully handles some of the more extravagant emotional moments.

Although the production includes some pretty 'in-yer-face' confrontation, it is not slice-of-life naturalistic; O'Brien uses language to great effect and the production exploits the passionate theatricality of the text. One thing rings oddly. Does a man as much of the theatre as director Mathias really think that when called for 'beginners' Clarissa's Rosalind would already be dressed in her Ganymede clothes?

This is a play that is centred on women but with a phallo-centric idea at its heart. O'Brien makes Pauline quote Henry as saying he always thought he had found something different in each new woman but they all turned out the same. In the end they all lose him – and perhaps a large chunk of themselves. Triptych is a play that is perhaps more theatre than life but in its ninety minutes it does catch the awfulness of being in love.

Howard Loxton 2008

Rogues and Vagabonds Read Full Review


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