Switzerland: little light on the darkly talented Highsmith
In Switzerland, playwright Joanna Murray-Smith imagines the twilight of author Patricia Highsmith’s life.
Author Patricia Highsmith spent her final years sequestered in a bunker-like house in the Swiss Alps. Cantankerous, cynical and paranoid, she much preferred her imagined characters to other people. She wrote more than 20 novels, including her “Ripliad”, the five books featuring her best-known creation, the talented conman and killer Tom Ripley.
In Switzerland, Joanna Murray-Smith imagines the twilight of Highsmith’s life.
Highsmith (Jenny Davis) finds her solitude interrupted when a representative from her publishing house, Edward Ridgeway (Giuseppe Rotondella), shows up to convince her to produce one more Ripley novel before she dies. The two-hander is playful, often funny, and treats its spiky charge with respect and even warmth. Its main theme, that the author prefers the world of her imagination, is well explored.
But while the script cherrypicks Highsmith’s eccentricities — her snail-breeding hobby, her collection of antique weapons, her love of show tunes, her racism — it does not connect them in a way that penetrates the surface.
This Black Swan production has similar issues.
The acting is tight, and Davis and Rotondella allow the physicality of their characters to soak right through.
Rotondella’s whole posture shifts with the development of his character, and Davis harbours an extensive arsenal of Highsmith’s gestures and idiosyncrasies that she metes out with perfect consistency.
Her navigation is not perfect, however; as a character, Highsmith is a tangle of mischief and depression, and Davis occasionally falters in the transitions. Despite this, the two actors are well matched, and the wit and cheek of the script crackles between them.
Director Lawrie Cullen-Tait has emphasised the play’s wit and lightness, and does not sufficiently illuminate Highsmith’s dark side. At no point is the author’s cruelty, her ability to do harm, particularly believable.
In Bruce McKinven’s clever design, the tilt of the stage has Rotondella struggling uphill to win over his contrarian target. Its grey minimalism suggests the bleakness of Highsmith’s self-made prison cum sanctuary. Lucy Birkinshaw’s lights give McKinven’s concrete walls cadence, hardening or softening them as necessary.
At one point, the light projects the characters’ profiles on to a wall — the world of Highsmith’s imagination realised in shadowplay.
Switzerland is smart, fun, pacy theatre that regularly sends chuckles through its audience, and there’s a twist in the tale.
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