The Red Barn review, Lyttelton

David Hare's The Red Barn is a story about marriage. Donald and Ingrid are comfortably wed. They live 30 miles from where they grew up. Their lovely girls are at boarding school. Meanwhile, childless Ray lives in luxury in  Manhattan with his trophy wife, Mona. He's banging everything that moves. When, after a cocktail party they've all attended, Ray disappears in the snow, both marriages and the narratives the couples have created to safeguard their happy co-existences, are smashed open. Donald find himself propelled into infidelity, and rages against a life wasted. He's asking himself who's to blame...

The Red Barn unpicks the component parts of marriage until all that's left is a handful of scraps and a pile of threads.  Donald, top of year at Harvard, was risk averse. Ray, not quite so brilliant, climbed effortlessly by dint - we are led to believe - of his high socialisation. How much of what our lives become is determined by circumstances, how much by design, and how much by conscious choice?  As Donald contemplates what might have been, we get an insight into the way he thinks, and into the way he thinks he thinks. Hare's script is a brilliant exposition of external expectation and quiet, internal, rage.

This may not, however, be how Georges Simenon wrote the original novel, and that would explain Robert Icke's film-noir/graphic-novel staging and the play's incongruous ending. Every scene happens in a new frame/box. Bunny Christie's filmic set is fantastic, but the disconnect between visuals and action is total. The visuals are tense, dark, and accompanied by a faux-thriller soundtrack. The action is bright, clear, precise. Managing the two is a brilliant cast led by Mark Strong who sizzles as the neutered Donald, thrashing around in his search for liberation. Hope Davis as the tightly-sprung Ingrid, polices his actions with growing concern. The actors take on the set in a battle of meaning and, by the end, pull ahead by a whisker.

In conclusion: The Red Barn has been mis-advertised as a psychological thriller. The people behind me made the common complaint that this acute portrayal of middle-age is neither psychological nor thrilling. There is, nonetheless, loads of value here, but anyone aged under 40 will struggle to care about either the situation or the characters - even Mona, who is played by Elizabeth Debicki of The Night Manager.



Red Barn is at the Lyttelton Theatre, National Theatre, South Bank, London SE1.   Run ends Jan 17