What would you do if your partner began to spend a lot of time with someone you never met? There'd be trouble. You'd naturally want to meet them, see who they were. Sort it out. But what if that wasn't possible? Famous playwright Cathy (Amy Marchant) has a new friend Charlotte (Helen Kennedy) and everyone wants to meet her. She's exciting, fun. She drinks, smokes and kisses girls. She's a prostitute, very pretty and so liberated. This becomes an understandable problem for Cathy's strait-laced husband Jamie (Pierre Tailleaux); Charlotte simply doesn't exist. How can he stay with a woman who betrays him yet how can he leave the one he loves whose very mind is unraveling? That's where Cathy's unconventional therapist, Michael (Edmund Digby-Jones) comes in. He's the only one who can traverse the mental landscape of Cathy's mind and finally confront Charlotte. But can Cathy be rescued from Charlotte, moreover does she even want to be rescued?Hannah Patterson explores these dilemmas in 'The Play about Charlotte', a play of grace and bite where emotional betrayal and mental illness forms a vice-grip on the sweet love of youth. The niece-of-Pinter dialogue comes in swift slices of the knife:Jamie But, you love her.Cathy Wont the dinner be burning?Jamie Youre in love with her.Cathy Smells burnt.With a very simple set of a table and chairs, the action moves back and forth in time and place from Jamie & Cathy's home to the therapist's office. Changes are smoothly accomplished by the director, also Ms. Patterson, with subtle changes in lighting creating a liquid flow encompassing the entire work. Scenes repeat, dialogue leaps over itself just when it's needed to bring us speeding past flashing alternates of reality and illusion like a train passing in the night. For example Jamie addresses Cathy but her answers come from an overlapping conversation between Charlotte and Cathy. This shunts us hard into an underlying theme of our fractured idea of what's normal.What is normal? Well, it's what Jamie wants. He wants things back as they were. But for Cathy, this new person has freed her from a long period of writer's block. Her first two plays were based on growing, loving and fighting with Jamie but that source ran into a wall of stasis as they became an ordinary, 'normal' couple. Now she has someone new and this person represents a departure from her closeted life to an exhilarating, erotic-fueled otherworld that sets her writing on fire. And everyone objects. Counters Cathy with typical ferrum hauteur; "Write well but heaven forbid don't write anything they don't like". She sees this window of liberty and intends to travel through it. But it's not quite so simple, she must fall in love with Charlotte, her new muse, as she did with Jamie. The critical difference being that Jamie is a physical person who comes and goes but Charlotte is in her mind and may never leave. Cathy's life changing error is in mistaking this window of liberty for a precipice.The performances are mostly taut. Necessarily so for this short, emotionally raw journey through the barren landscape of a failing relationship. Ms. Marchant creates a boldly drawn Cathy that evokes intelligence and education while shading in the infuriating haplessness of the mentally ill. Her dance of aggression and retreat with Jamie has a skilled, tempered force behind it. Mr. Tailleaux's Jamie is a difficult character to play - that of the loving supporting husband but he does so with a firm, grounded sense whose unanimated face manages artfully to project his internal strife. Ms. Kennedy owns the evening with her lithe deliciousness, brassy verve and a beguiling scent of fallen English Rose. Her mischievous smile and physical gestures are swimmingly louche and seduces Cathy at every move. Mr. Digby-Jones is miscast as Michael looking a lot younger, say 22, than the 50 year old he is trying to play. This disparity hopefully accounts for his oleaginous imitation of a Harley Street stereotype which rings a false note.While the play's stated aim is to 'challenge the stigma of mental illness', it hardly achieves anything of the sort. It's a relationship play, which is why I have made little mention of her particular problem of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). At any rate DID has raised controversy which some claim is not a disease at all. What makes the play work is quite straight forward; two crossing dilemmas for Jamie and Cathy. If Cathy pursues Charlotte her writing will benefit but she will lose her sanity. If she doesn't pursue her she'll lose the only identity she has; that of a writer. Jamie's dilemma is stated above. What action Jamie takes he must because both sides of her dilemma have no place for him. Cathy has the ability to choose which path to take and this keeps the tension up throughout.Ultimately Cathy is a selfish and dangerous individual. It is this that is the most interesting aspect of the play. She'll do anything to write because it's her entire identity since she gained fame at a very young age. Jamie was used solely as ink for her pen from day one; a physical manifestation of writing material. Now that he's dry, or should we say grown up, she has to get someone else. This is why empathy for her registers a lot less than was probably intended. It may also contribute to the soft landing at the end with neither emotional completeness nor a thought-provoking bang. It does have a perfectly valid ending (I can't tell you), but I felt like I wanted more. When this play goes to London and New York, and it will, perhaps a full length version will explore the enormous promise and richness of this wonderful piece.The play does not break new ground nor leaves you thinking anything different about mental illness. It's simply a lovely, well written, superb piece of theatre by a new writer.
