Psychoanalysis and surrealism come under the microscope in Terry Johnson's glorious comedy classic in which the documented meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali is imagined as a farcical caper with paedophilia, death and penis envy at its heart. Directing the action is Jessica, a highly strung stranger who turns up at Freud's consulting room in Hampstead in the early hours of the morning and refuses to leave until and unless he goes through the notes of a woman whose hysteria he cured and then later condemned.
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Indira Varma plays Jessica as a wartime detective, forcing the witness through carefully laid out evidence. Antony Sher as the dying Freud is a ponderous hobbit, resistant to ugly truths about compromises made to retain the patronage of powerful men. Will Keen is a keenly Spanish and silly Dali, and David Horovitch is Freud's critical friend, Yehuda, the sober yardstick against which the merriment of lost trousers, naked ladies and slamming doors is measured.
The subconscious of the play, inevitably, is revealed to be full of dark and dangerous memories, and what's so clever about Johnson's script is the fluidity with which farce flows into tragedy and out again via surrealist fantasy to ruminations on the dying of the light. His polemic about Freud's flawed and misogynist misunderstanding of women is powerful, and the set - there is an moving and iconic moment when the walls disappear and we are in a surrealist painting of Freud's subconscious with his elderly sisters, stripped and humiliated, being led to their death in concentration camps - aids and abets each scene.
In conclusion: There seemed to be timing issues with the changes of mood, but when a production is on the move it probably has to shake down and find its pace at each new location. The cracking lines and stellar cast make it a good watch.
References
Quentin Letts review in the Daily Mail
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