Nightingale by Lynn Redgrave

[Reza]

NY times

November 4, 2009
THEATER REVIEW | 'NIGHTINGALE'


Redgrave Uncorsets a Relative Long Gone
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

Lynn Redgrave explores the life of her maternal grandmother through the prism of her own in her reflective new solo show, “Nightingale,” which opened Tuesday night at City Center, courtesy of Manhattan Theater Club . Sound cozy? Well, any expectations that this will be a sentimental journey should immediately be deferred.

Beatrice Kempson did not play a significant role in Ms. Redgrave’s life, and gauzy recollections of sweet childhood intimacies are absent. Although the outlines are based on the facts, the portrait is fundamentally drawn from Ms. Redgrave’s imagination, not from direct experience.

“Nightingale” is unclouded by girlhood affection. In fact this spare, astringent look at the life of a Victorian woman is infused with a chilly sense of the limitations and disappointments of women’s lives ­ both then and now ­ and the shrinking of the spirit that can result.

Ms. Redgrave, who performs seated at a table at the front of the stage, places the show in the context of recent traumas in her own life. As many will know, Ms. Redgrave is a cancer survivor; as perhaps many more will know, this year a niece, the actress Natasha Richardson , died in a skiing accident. Before these events Ms. Redgrave’s long marriage had ended. (Treatment for an unspecified recent medical problem made it necessary for Ms. Redgrave to consult the text during the show; this does not detract from the effectiveness of her performance.)

These psychic hammer blows and still others, which she recounts in clipped, anxious phrases, sent Ms. Redgrave in search of family ties she had long ignored. Visiting her grandmother’s grave, she sees the name has been washed away.

“I called out her name,” she recalls. “I needed her. I needed her to make me safe. Connected. But I hardly knew her. Just a few ... threads ... of her life.”

Ms. Redgrave weaves these threads, and more of her own imagining, into a convincing (if sometimes generic) tapestry that evokes the life of a genteel Englishwoman born in the late 19th century. Assuming her grandmother’s voice, Ms. Redgrave creates the memoirs Beatrice never wrote.

They begin when the adolescent Beatrice already begins to display signs of anxiousness and dissatisfaction (“I’m never happy”) as she muses in church on the changes her body is undergoing. The youngest of three daughters in the family, she worries at 17 that she will remain a lifelong spinster, although her ideas of marriage and womanhood have never been clarified by any immersion in hard facts.

When she is duly married off to a man she barely knows, the wedding night is a horror of shame and awkwardness from which she never really recovers. “Marriage seemed such an exciting idea until it happened,” she recounts, the bright, girlish eagerness in her voice now turned to a crisp, formal gentility.

Ms. Redgrave’s narrative borders on parody in this long, agonizing segment, which recounts in perhaps too much detail the unwelcome intimacies Beatrice endured. (And did Victorian mothers really tell their daughters, “Just close your eyes and think of England”? I always thought it was a joke.) The emotionally sterile marriage bed leads, unsurprisingly, to an emotionally sterile marriage, as Beatrice gives birth to three children but can find affection in her heart only for the last, her boy Robin, whom she smothers with the love she denied his older brother and sister.

Ms. Redgrave’s imagined memoirs of her grandmother’s life are interspersed with recollections of her own, as she notes some sad correspondences. Breaking up the narrative of Beatrice’s disappointing experience are passages in which Ms. Redgrave recounts her own marriage to a man she scarcely knew ­ they had dated for all of two weeks before deciding to wed ­ and the emptiness that followed.

“Loneliness within a marriage can drive you mad,” she says sadly, although she is baffled at her grandmother’s utter indifference to two of her three children. (Ms. Redgrave clearly adores her own children.) Late in the show she imagines her grandmother’s grudging admiration for her daughter Rachel Kempson, who became a celebrated actress and married the equally celebrated actor Michael Redgrave .

“Lady Redgrave,” Beatrice muses coolly. “So strange to hear her called that. To remember that little pinched face, the little sticky hands clinging to my dress. Now a lady. A married woman. A star.”

The fundamental drawback of “Nightingale,” directed by Joseph Hardy, is the off-putting persona of the woman Ms. Redgrave has conjured. The remote, privileged, terminally unsatisfied Beatrice can be oppressive company as she derides or ignores her young daughter and fumes about her husband’s inadequacies. Only when Beatrice recounts an unfulfilled attraction to a farmer she meets while on summer vacation does her heart seem to pulse with warm blood.

By contrast, we want to spend more time in the company of Ms. Redgrave herself. A tantalizing glimpse of her early stardom ­ she was appearing on Broadway when movie fame hit with “Georgy Girl,” and she and her sister, Vanessa, were featured on the cover of Time magazine ­ passes by almost before we can savor it. And the snapshots of her marriage, told only in oblique references, leave hanging many intriguing questions.

Most remarkable is the discordance between Ms. Redgrave’s public persona in her youth, as a 1960s movie star and a member of an all-but-royal acting clan, and the sheltered young woman she clearly was, too unsophisticated in matters of love and sex to know better than to tie her destiny to a man she barely knew. There is surely more to the story, although of course it is Ms. Redgrave’s right to keep private what she wants to keep private. Still, given her abundant gifts as both a performer and a writer (she paid wonderful tribute to her father, Michael Redgrave, in a previous show, “ Shakespeare for My Father”), it’s tempting to hope that someday she will expand on the glimpses in the mirror we catch here to explore aspects of her own emotional life with the clarity and empathy she brings to the ghost life of her grandmother.

NIGHTINGALE

A solo show written and performed by Lynn Redgrave ; directed by Joseph Hardy; sets by Tobin Ost; costumes by Alejo Vietti; lighting by Rui Rita; music and sound by John Gromada; associate artistic director, Mandy Greenfield. Presented by the Manhattan Theater Club , Lynne Meadow , artistic director; Barry Grove, executive producer. At City Center, Stage I, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212. Through Dec. 13. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.