Return To Venice is a new play from Bern Bowers that continues Thomas Mann’s classic novella Death In Venice. Playing with Mann’s classic, Bowers plays with fire and gets burned.
In Death in Venice, an author finds himself spiritually enamoured with a beautiful youth. Return To Venice follows the boy, Tadzio – here renamed Adzio (Tom Rooke) – as a young man. If you compress the plot of Return To Venice crudely, Adzio essentially undergoes a mid-life crisis. He returns because he happened to find a photo of himself taken by Mann (quite why they’ve seen the need to change the character name from Ashenbach to the name of the author isn’t explained), and a psychiatrist happens to tell him that finding this man is the key to finding himself, and Adzio happens to find another of Mann’s protégés in Venice and suddenly realises he was gay. It’s all the sort of stuff you’d get up to on a ‘gap yar’.
There’s an immaturity about both the text and Rooke’s performance that doesn’t echo the lost youth, but poor treatment of characters that were born from another man’s pen. What Bowers was trying to do is evident, but the result is sketchy. He explores the problem of immortalising and fictionalising a real human being in fiction in a way that echoes John Logan’s Peter and Alice, but less successfully. The plot is strung together on fine threads. The classical influences on Mann and his lyrical style are reflected in Bowers’ writing but without the same subtlety, the consequent dialogue is stilted and as unnatural as the performances.
The script drags following a set that goes on too long, but picks up with Leonard Silevis’ scenes in the second act. His acting is understated, reflecting that much of his characters’ turmoil is internal and melancholic. Rooke has the sculpted face and blonde locks of a character from Grecian mythology, but he doesn’t know how to use it. His face contorts, he patronises the text, and combined with his lisp, gives a petulant performance that is barely saved by his transformation into Mann at the end of the play. The supporting cast are a little better, the character of Adzio’s wife, Izabella (Tess Cuchan) could be fleshed out, and Keith Drinkel gets a few laughs in his many roles.
The question of spiritual versus physical love that exists in the homoerotic undertones of Death in Venice, are realised in Return To Venice with a brash hand. Return To Venice suffers under the weight of Mann’s legacy and the result is altogether offensively unfaithful.
