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The Lady’s back in style
THE LADY FROM DUBUQUE
Haymarket
THE Lady from Dubuque arrived on Broadway in 1980 and was quickly sent back to the obscurity of that small town in Iowa.
After only 12 performances, Edward Albee failed to realise his ability to splash his audiences with the deadly venom of family relationships and the usual potion of love and hate so brilliantly painted 20 years ago in Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf.
This short play is set in the familiar territory of middle-class Keneticutt. Sam (Robert Sella) and his wife Jo (Catherine McCormack) are ending an after-dinner evening with four friends.
The drink flows. They play like bored and stale adolescents 20 questions. Sam’s question is: “Who am I?”
That is the philosophical basis of the play. You will all remember Descartes’ I Think So Am?
They are startled by seeing an audience and talk occasionally to us.
Jo is dying painfully with cancer and Catherine McCormack runs the emotional gamut of the conscious dying person amid the barbs bewilderments and bitterness of comfortable suburban life – a fine performance.
There is the unspoken terror of death that will come to us all, which will come and end the complacent world of trimmed lawns, ordered organised and formalised domesticity hidden behind parlour games.
Her friend Carol (Jennifer Regan) married to the bovine friend spices it up with a provocative sexual bristle while Edgar (Chris Larkin) is the kindly defeated symbol of the emasculated middle class.
After 40 minutes Dame Margaret Smith arrives almost as regal as Helen Mirren, elegant and flawless.
To Sam’s bewilderment she says she is his dying wife’s mother. Transparently she is not but Jo in spite of Sam’s objections to his newly found relations warmly welcomes this refined messenger who has come to ease her passage for she is the Angel of Death with bleak advice.
Antony Page’s production is smooth and accurate and if you ask me it will be on its way back to Broadway when Dame Margaret finally throws in her witches’ bonnet as Professor McGonagall at Hogwarts.
Until June 9
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