Polar Bears are dangerous. There are some lines that are equally deadly. This is getting boring. is one of them. I cant believe this is really happening. is another. When it falls on the shoulders of Richard Coyle at the end of the play to deliver a lecture to the audience on the nature of philosophy to justify all that has gone before, he ends up by asking them if they really care at all. A less polite audience than that at the Donmar might have interjected. This is a play that strays dangerously close to suicide, which is ironically part of its theme.Johdi May plays Kay, a young woman suffering from some unidentified bipolar disorder whose brother Sandy (Paul Hilton) forced her to stand on a chair with a noose round her neck when she was a little girl. The children have grown up now into a pretty dysfunctional couple and Kay has married University lecturer John (Coyle) whom she accuses of treating her more like a patient than a wife. All turn in fine performances, particularly May as the disturbed and suicidal young woman who believes she is an illustrator for childrens literature published by Hodder and Stoughton. There are, I imagine, more terrifying forms of schizophrenia. When the play opens, her long-suffering husband has recently strangled her and hidden her body in the cellar, and is gleefully telling his appalled brother-in-law about the smell and the flies, advising him not to go down there. For a moment it seemed that we were in for some Ortonesque black comedy. On the night I went, a woman in the audience started giggling at this, and received frowns. Some Donmar audiences apparently dont do humour. It might have been better, however, if Polar Bears had continued in this vein and explored a serious subject in a darker way. Instead, what we get is a story of middle-class angst. Mark Haddon wrote an excellent novel, The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time about an autistic boy. It was rightly a best-seller. Here he attempts to do something similar with the character of Kay, who half way through the play tells the audience a childrens story about a beautiful woman, a monster, and a prince. It is a long story, and it belongs in a novel. That, sadly, is the problem with Polar Bears. It is a play of lectures. Theatre writing requires different skills and these are just not on show here. The characters of Sandy and mother Margaret - a tragically underused Celia Imrie - are woefully underdeveloped, and you never really care about any of them as people. In one scene, John and Kay lay back and give each other a score for their sexual performance and discuss the potential of bondage and sadomasochism, but it simply doesnt go anywhere. Kays journey into and through mental illness is never really explored, and neither is the effect it has on her family. The play feels like a first draft and I couldnt escape the thought that the Donmar had done Haddon a disservice by putting it on in this shape. It is also an untidy production full of unnecessary bursts of dramatic music, Spielbergian shafts of light shooting up through the floorboards, and props falling mysteriously from the ceiling, as though director Jamie Lloyd is trying to compensate for the lack of drama in the writing by pumping it up elsewhere. I did not know what to make of the character of Jesus (yes, really) who, in flowing robes and bare feet, drags a decomposing body on stage and gives John a talk on the final destination of human flesh. It supposedly meant something. But as John so succinctly put it at the end of his own oration on philosophy, did we really care?Polar Bears might have made a good novel wherein Haddon could have developed and honed his themes with different skills. As theatre, it simply doesnt work.
