End of Story
The Chelsea Theatre, London

Patrick Turner

Lilli has discovered an entry in Marco's journal in which he fantasises about an anonymous younger woman. She confronts him over the course of a humid summer evening, leading to a rapid emotional and dramatic reversal that sees Marco walk out. Lilli later visits their daughter Cecile (Amber Batty) whom she has not seen in three years. During this encounter the two women trade accusation and counter-accusation about Cecile's childhood, her recent divorce and the triangular relationship between mother, father and daughter. Each of the protagonists is finally revealed as duplicitous in their own way: each victim as much as perpetrator. Mother and daughter part, perhaps for the last time.

Why should anyone be particularly interested in yet another bourgeois tale of marital meltdown? I would suggest that at a minimum any narrative of competing personal histories must believably issue from a common source. The cast need to be able to generate on stage the heat of a shared history. While accounts of the past in End of Story are contested throughout, the production nonetheless creates little palpable sense of memory's disruptive capacity. Lilli's invocations of her and Marco's former sexual chemistry critically fail to generate any erotic tension. Similarly, when Cecile recounts her mother's use of bedtime stories as a sounding board for her own literary endeavours, her anger appears insufficient. For its full realisation the actress playing Cecile must be able to transport the audience back in time to Cecile's childhood, something Amber Batty signally fails to do.

The compressed structure of the play - the fact that it is a narrative of ending - heightens its emotional scale and leaves little room for the slow burn of intensification. Lilli, for example, is from the outset in an advanced state of despair. When she drunkenly traverses the set, wineglass in hand, proclaiming, 'how old I feel inside', the audience is left in little doubt as to the tenor of the ensuing drama. From the moment Marco arrives home late from work to eat supper with his wife, both actors, however, seem for the most part incapable of keeping up with the incendiary emotional demands of the text. As a consequence, they frequently resort to playing the 'inner' (Lilli) or 'outer' (Marco) worlds of their characters. Where Marco should incarnate a complex set of emotions and scruples, he merely comes across as vapid and largely indifferent to Lilli. The actor needs to make us believe that he has grown sexually indifferent to and indeed disgusted with a woman that he once physically worshipped, and at the same time that he still retains a strong regard and affection for her.

Olmi's writing contains much that is commendable. End of Story is finely laced with the bathetic details of middle-aged sexual ennui, marital self-delusion and long standing resentments. An example of this is when Lilli lets Marco know that 'the day you started sleeping in pyjamas you started to look like a husband - ugly'. Olmi also shows how intergenerational rivalries and alliances can poison family life. Lilli is seen to be pathologically jealous of the ostensibly close relationship between husband and daughter. At one point she contrasts Marco's disdain for her thoughts on 'life after death, your mother and whales' with his readiness to listen to Cecile discuss 'feminism, abortion and divorce'. She even goes so far as to accuse Marco of somatizing his 'unhealthy' feelings for Cecile by becoming ill during her divorce.

Director John Joe Turner's interpretation of End of Story is at once pedestrian and over reverential. Where Olmi intimates psychodrama, Turner discerns middlebrow soap. Where she offers caustic observation, he finds arch sitcom. The emotional range displayed by its leading players is correspondingly limited. The production's lack of subtlety is also exemplified in its design, a too-literal attempt to evoke bourgeois sophistication: Sumptuous cream-coloured furnishings for Lilli and Marco's flat, and grey and red designer chic for Cecile's. The musical interludes of 60s French pop, which might have created an ironic counterpoint to the scenes, merely confirm a general impression of directorial laziness.

End of Story is a play with the potential to become a worthy addition to the canon of bourgeois domestic drama. Unfortunately, this is only discernible in Turner's interpretation through a palimpsest of mediocrity. Olmi's writing deserves a production with far more invention, and far greater sensitivity to the nuances of the text than Two's Company appear capable of delivering.

Till 14 December

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