Red Barn - NT

I saw the last show, and I found it thrilling, stylish, and unique but misogynistic.

Since the show is over, mega-spoilers follow. . .

This show reminded me strongly (pun unintended) of a strangely intense, fiercely controlling but always affable acquaintance, from a couple of decades back, who would rave about a patterned black and white shirt I used to wear, and jokingly threaten to take it from me. After discovering his wife was leaving him, he shot her, shot his daughter, and shot himself. . .

In hindsight, Mark Strong's Donald Dodd feels like that man, someone with a vision for how life should be, a vision for how women should be, a vision for how he himself should be, and when his delusions collapsed, turned to extreme violence. The thrill in this show was knowing something was off with Donald Dodd's life, knowing something terrible would happen, but not knowing what and when.

How perfect the casting. Mark Strong, an actor whose very name tells you he's "strong," and whose ever-threatening physicality seems to confirm this, playing someone ostensibly so meek and mild. The suspense and inevitability of the worm turning had me squirming.

The horrible thing about this show is that it seems to encourage him to turn, at least partially to justify his murder of his wife, and to a degree, the murder of all women. Clearly, the creatives intend us to view this show as a kind of fever dream, the misogyny in the lead character's head expressionistically writ large: it's not the show that is misogynist, they would argue, it's Donald Dodd.

Thus the huge all-seeing eye of Hope Davis' Ingrid Dodd, the first image we see, projected onto an immense screen at the optician's office, can be read as Dodd's paranoid male fantasy of the omniscient controlling woman. That is why, inevitably, the last sentence he utters in the play, after killing Ingrid, is "I shot her in the eye."

However, male paranoia in this production reaches beyond the character of Donald Dodd to pervade every scene of the play. All the men are short-sighted dreamers: Dodd dreams of an empowered life, Ray seeks release through sex, Dodd's father hopes his son will treat his wife better, Lieutenant Olsen believes he's solving a case. In fact, all of them are shown to be dupes of robotic omniscient women, who manipulate everyone around them.

Elizabeth Debicki's Mona at first appears an uncalculating dreamer, like the men, until we realise she's been playing Dodd all along, that he never had a hope with her, as she was taking flowers from another man even before her affair with Dodd began. Mona's maid sees everything that happens in the apartment, dealing with those flowers, grinning knowingly at Dodd as she puts the flowers away. The omnipresence of this maid, even when Dodd is having sex, shows just how dispassionate, knowing and calculating Ingrid and her maid are, both women conspiring in the understanding that sex is just a tool of power and manipulation, and that Dodd's real affections and dreams of intimacy are merely a male weakness.

Cuckolding her billionaire husband, young bride Patricia Ashbridge (played at the final show by understudy, Arabella Neale) lasciviously lures the doomed Ray (Nigel Whitmey) to her private bathroom for uncomplicated sex, like a spider lures a fly. After all, Ray is destined to so tucker himself out in this bathroom, that he can barely stand in the storm that ensures, and stumbles to his death.

But the most emblematic female in the play is the omniscient Ingrid, she of the all-seeing-giant-eye who even Mona fears, brilliantly played by Hope Davis like a bored supervillain, whose subdued omnipotence seems civilised, but in fact, kills the joy and spirit of every man in her orbit. She effortlessly turns Donald's father against him, fools the Lieutenant by hiding evidence, and manipulates every facet of her husband's life, even planning his affair with Mona by asking him to sleep between herself and Mona, where he can literally be squished and sandwiched and suffocated by scheming women. It stands to reason that she has given Donald only daughters, and has tricked him into believing that raising more women in the world is his main and only satisfying function in life.

The vision of this play is that females are threatening. The key symbolic image of the play is when Donald Dodd is lured by the feminine spherical beauty of the round hanging chairs in Mona's flat, tries to sit in one, and is swallowed up by it. Also, all the scene changes are like lady parts opening and closing to give birth to the stupid dupe male protagonist's delusions and ultimate doom.

Truly, if ever a play has managed to visually conjure up the mechanical inevitability of doom and fate, it is this one, with the Lyttelton functioning like a machine, cranking it's way smoothly and methodically through the noirish plot, opening then cruelly closing portholes of hope. The realisation of filmic scene changes, as well as the superb storm sound effects, swallow up the lives of two men (and one female supervillain) with dazzling efficiency.

Mark Strong restrains his emotions to the level of a machine in this play. It was exquisite and thrilling to see him check his natural explosiveness for so much of the duration of the show, giving the play a tantric aspect, whereby the thrill was in the wait.

I got a major charge from watching this play, but I was disturbed by the po-faced male fear and misogyny that underlies it.

On a side note, this production may be the first Elizabeth Debicki project where her nudity is completely warranted, as the underlying misogyny which requires her to constantly get her kit off, pervades and is the subject of the play.

Overall, a unique and fascinating evening, in stagecraft, in acting, and for the slow-motion investigation of a disturbed mind. But to the extent that this play suggests that disturbed minds are not disturbed, that women are robots invented to manipulate men, and that terrible violence can be justified, well, that's plain wrong!

4 stars

Fantastic behind the scenes video into the set changes of the play.

Thank you SO much for posting that! Really fascinating and I was desperate to see how they pulled it all off!

The issue the video raises about a transfer is how you could fit that sort of a show into a standard theatre that lacks a massive storage space on stage left.

No play isn't misogynistic, neither is Othello. And Debicki doesn't appear nude and neither does she "constantly" get her kit off.

Steve, you have thought longer and harder about this than I have and you're extremely convincing but it's still a leap for me to see the play as portraying these two women as "bodysnatchers". To me they're simply strong women who know what they want and work to achieve it. If it were written the other way around, if the men were the controlling ones and the women portrayed as weak and indecisive, would we be questioning the rationale of the play? Perhaps we would have other objections to that.

To me Ingrid encouraged her husband's affair because she knew him and knew her and knew it wouldn't work and wanted to have a measure of control over the situation. She was protecting herself. I don't think that makes Ingrid omniscient - it means she pays attention. I see the "hovering eye" in that regard.

I also don't think there's any tinge of "necessary justice" or "leading the resistance" in Dodd's act of murder. To me it was a shocking and unexpected act, the act of a desperately weak man, entirely unjustified by anything Ingrid had done. Dodd's perception of being controlled and constrained was his own fantasy based on the simple fact that his wife was stronger than he was.

Anyway, interesting stuff. Thanks for bringing all this to the surface.

That's a little unfair on the British theatre-going public, Jan. Maybe once a decade you get a bit of nudity. The only occasions I can recall in 30 years of theatre-going here are Hitchcock Blonde and (a top half in) Red Barn. Oh, and Bent. If you spent a fortnight going to the theatre in Germany you'd see more...

Some good thoughts, synchrony. For the record I didn't suggest that Ingrid was "innocent". Certainly she was manipulative but, IMO, it was self protective, to save her marriage. Yes, the cigarette butts were to let Donald know that she was on to him but that does not mean she was controlling his every move. Donald was always a free agent. What he couldn't live with was being so well understood by his wife - she knew him better than he knew himself. IMO she was very much his superior - a fact underlined by Hope Davis's brilliant performance - and his only answer to that was murder.