[star rating=”2.5″]
OBSESSION. An NT Live screening directed by Ivo van Hove with Jude Law and Halina Reijn.
MEGAN FURNISS reviews
Usually plays are turned into films, but here director Van Hove takes an iconic film by Luchino Visconti and adapts it into a stage version.
Actually, the history behind it is complicated. The original version which started it all was a 1934 novel by James M. Cain, called The Postman Always Rings Twice. The book inspired two films with this name – a 1946 version with Lana Turner and John Garfield, and a 1981 version with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson. It also inspired Visconti’s Ossessione, an Italian film of the same story, made in 1946. Which has, in turn, inspired Obsession, the English NT Live production.
The plot goes – a good looking vagabond comes to town and is immediately attracted to a young married woman. The feeling is mutual, since she is trapped in a loveless marriage to a much older man. They plot to murder her husband, an act which does not bring them together but separates them and ultimately destroys them.
On paper this should make for fantastic drama, but …
On paper this should make for fantastic drama, with the magnetic talent of Jude Law (the vagabond Gino), the powerful and extraordinary Halina Reijn (Hanna), and the creative visionary Ivo van Hove at the helm (he directed one of the best plays I have ever seen, his adaptation of Hedda Gabler). Unfortunately, Obsession is interminable, gauche, shallow and sentimental, with gratuitous stage stuff; black car oil, water, a big slab of meat and four garbage cans of trash and bad long pauses, looks and pointless emotion. There is also a bizarre and overly pretentious sound track that I didn’t understand.
It is seldom you see so much talent working so hard and managing to achieve so little. The biggest problem is with the script and dialogue. It is an adaptation that allows for very little subtext or interpretation. It has a certain literalness that makes it one dimensional and without nuance. The stylised performance doesn’t help either, making the vocal expression stilted, awkward and almost whiny, except for the crying and shouting. The almost empty stage is disturbed by a clumsy floating car engine contraption, a weird floating piano accordion, a treadmill (for the worst clichés of Gino running away), and a bath and running water on stage, into which a grease covered, undressed Hanna gets, but she keeps her panties on. Naah.
Cringe-worthy singing
Oh, and then there is the singing. First an opera singing competition that Hanna’s husband enters, and then a weird, unsuccessful seduction thing that Hanna does, and it is totally un-contextualised and cringe-worthy. Finally it is almost the end, and then a special screen slowly reveals and grey sea waves are projected onto it and Gino poses in agony and freedom in front of it, for what feels like forever.
I couldn’t stay for the curtain call, even though Bruce Springsteen’s version of This Land is Your Land was playing. It was too horrible and I was so bitterly disappointed.
What: Obsession
Where and when: Ster-Kinekor Nouveau Cinemas on 24 and 25 June and 28 and 29 June
Book: Ster-Kinekor
WS
