Love, Loss & Chianti
Since reopening at the end of last year, the impressively rebuilt Riverside Studios has been busy remaking its mark by the river in Hammersmith.
Love, Loss & Chianti is its latest production - a double-bill of two 50-minute pieces, both two-handers, performed by Robert Bathurst and Rebecca Johnson. Based on the 2009 poems by Christopher Reid, the first piece of the evening is A Scattering (which won the 2009 Costa prize). It’s an exploration of love, loss and grief, which sees Bathurst's character recalling the illness and death of his beloved wife. For 26 years, Reid was married to the actress Lucinda Gane until she died in 2005; he then wrote poetry in order to preserve her memory. Bathurst was so taken with these works that he decided to adapt them for the stage, and you can see why.
Lucinda, played by Rebecca Johnson, is battling with cancer, and Reid’s rich and complex prose transports us from happy holiday memories in Greece to far darker moments of head shaving and then, the hospice. There is a wonderful moment when Bathurst’s character imagines that Lucinda, after her death, is walking around the garden with him; he is showing her what is flourishing and what is not, whilst she helps him to remember the names of the all the plants and flowers. It is painful and beautiful all at once; Reid paints a such a vivid picture of these two normal, very likeable people, whose hearts and souls have been torn apart by a terrible illness. Reid describes grief so profoundly that it is deeply moving; through his witty, multifaceted and compelling words, he seems able to articulate what we all feel, but can’t always express.
Bathurst, well known for his role in TV comedy-drama series Cold Feet, took a little while to warm up. The text is challenging, no doubt, and he ambled slightly awkwardly around the stage at first, but once he got going, I was hooked. I felt sometimes that he rushed, and that the words came and went too soon in some cases; I would have liked to mull over their meaning a little while longer. Rebecca Johnson’s bright-eyed performance as the multi-tasking and obviously much-loved female character was very believable; she portrayed the dynamism and bravery of Bathurst’s dying wife with ease.
Following a moving 50 minutes and a quick interval in the Studio’s swishy new river-facing restaurant/bar, I was looking forward to the light relief of The Song of Lunch, described in the programme as a ‘raucous verse comedy’. This time, Reid’s other career as a cartoonist is on show, as a disastrous date in Soho unfolds.
Sadly, my expectations weren’t met, as it just simply wasn’t very funny. There were perhaps a couple of chortles, but other than that myself and the audience remained silent throughout. Were we all still recovering from the aforementioned examination of grief? Were we collectively distracted by the capital’s apparent loo paper shortage? Or, by 9pm, had we already grown tired and were busy mentally planning our TfL journeys home? Whatever it was, the second show just didn’t work.
Unlike the first piece, neither character here were likeable; Bathurst’s character, who is attempting to rekindle an old flame, is self-important, sour and at times misogynistic – prone to what he describes as ‘the old male gaze, through alcoholic haze’. Yuck. Johnson’s second character was sharper, sassier, and suited her better than the first, but let’s face it, neither are great parts for any woman, and it was never really made clear why these two had ever decided to dine together once again, and what the whole point of any of it was really.
After the painful beauty of the first piece, the second fell flat. Reid’s prose is still undeniably impressive – with wonderfully expressive descriptions such as that of the old-fashioned chianti bottle, ‘like a cuckoo nestled in raffia swaddling’. Both Bathurst and Johnson deliver it all with admirable, exhausting energy, but it just missed the mark in terms of the promised comedic value.
Jason Morell’s direction is simple yet effective, if a little obvious at times, and the use of the two chairs felt a little like being at a tennis match (not in a good way, I might add). The on-stage projections felt naive and were, on the whole, unnecessary. In the second piece, they did at times help to create the buzz of the Soho brasserie, and facilitated the pigeon-filled dénouement, but during the first show they just seemed to distract from the complexity of the prose and poignancy of the story.
If the evening had consisted solely of A Scattering, I would have given the show ‘4 stars’, rather than 3. And if the projections had been reassessed and Bathurst had taken just a little more time with the text, allowing the audience to better absorb Reid’s extraordinary prose - maybe even 5.
Love, Loss & Chianti at Riverside Studios is on at Riverside Studios until 17 May 2020. Tue-Sun, 7.45pm, matinees Thu, Sat & Sun, 3pm. Adult £30, premium adult £37.50* (*best seats in the house plus a 175ml glass of chianti), concessions £25. Age guidance 11+. riversidestudios.co.uk
