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LIFE SUPPORT
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t
h e a t r e
Life Support Review:
The Independent
Bedside manners: Alan Bates and Nickolas Grace
keep vigil
over Georgina Hale in 'Life Support' (Geraint Lewis)
Theatre:
Life Support
Aldwych Theatre, London
You would surely
run out of fingers if you were to count the number of occasions
that Alan Bates has taken the lead in a Simon Gray play. In the
moving, astute, often funny Life Support at the Aldwych,
the actor does this author especially proud--not least because,
for some of the time, he has to perform a solo double-act. Keeping
vigil at the bedside of his wife--who is in a persistent vegetative
state as the result of a bee sting--the Bates character, Jeff
Golding, conducts imaginary marital conversations in which he
plays both parts. He'll try anything which might jog her back
into consciousness.
 Bates has always excelled at presenting the
barbed waggishness and quizzical, toying superiority that are
a cover, in some people, for lacerating despaire and self-dislike.
Here, he superbly suggests a man struggling to master overwhelming
grief, remorse, rage and tenderness with a kind of edged, floundering
flippancy.
Jeff is a fraudulent travel writer who has
made a mint out of portraying himself as the lovable accident-prone
comic butt in misadventures he invents in the safety of his hotel
suite. That joke has now, however, hideously backfired; his wife's
condition is the direct result of the one occasion in his life
when he actually behaved like his phoney prose persona. It in
no way eases his guilt that the accident happened during a snarling
alcoholic row. Perhaps the bee was his poison-bearing proxy.
"Everything glowed with a gleam. Yet
we were looking away!" At one point Jeff quotes these lines
of Thomas Hardy, acutest of poets about the repinings of widowerhood.
In one sense, Gray's play intimates, Hardy had it easy. At least
his first wife was incontrovertibly dead, whereas, given the
indeterminacy of the circumstances, Jeff has the privations of
bereavement without the emotional privileges, and suffers the
anguish of feeling that his love is insufficient to call his
wife back to life. In one simple but powerfully affecting touch,
Georgina Hale (excellent as the bed-bound spouse) is able, at
moments, to take over the lines of dialogue playing in Jeff's
head. But it's significant--perhaps a mark of his emotional honesty--that
he can only give her this free lease of life when steadfastly
looking away and pretending to read the paper. When he turns,
she's a vegetable again.
One of the paradoxes of Jeff's predicament
is brought home in the defiantly tasteless (and slightly contrived-seeming)
episode in which he calls in his mistress and literary agent
(Carole Nimmons) to discuss their affair in front of his comatose
spouse in the hope of reviving her. After all, he declares, he
has nothing to lose. To the riposte that this ruse might lose
him his marriage, he replies, "If there's still a marriage
to lose, I'm a lucky man, aren't I?"
Harold Pinter's meticulous and absorbind
production boasts fine performances from Nickolas Grace as Jeff's
outrageous, sponging, gay actor brother and from Frank McCusker
as a volubly caring, sharing doctor, whose interest in Jeff's
case turns out to be more professionally self-interested than
is seemly. There are some excellent jokes. (It was love at first
sight for the brother when a black youthheld a knife to his stomach:
"It takes most couples years to get to that point,"
comments Jeff.) At Tuesday's first night, a mobile phone went
off in the stalls during one of the emotional climaxes. It says
a lot for the power of Alan Bates's performance that the moment
was far from ruined.
PAUL TAYLOR
7 August 97
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