THERE was a huge stir, followed by many awards, when Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance opened at The Young Vic in 2018, where its sell-out run led to a fast West End transfer. So perhaps it’s surprising that the American writer’s earlier works didn’t make it across the Atlantic, although his first play, The Whipping Man, made its US debut in 2006.
It’s a huge coup for Bristol Old Vic to have the chance to give the first European production of Reverberation, first seen in 2015 in Connecticut and now in Bristol until 2nd November. It could hardly be more different from The Inheritance, which had a huge cast and played out the AIDS story against that of EM Forster’s Howard’s End.
Reverberation has a cast of three and is set in a two-storey London flat block. In the lower flat lives Jonathan and into the identical upstairs flat moves American Claire. Jonathan is gay, and the play opens as he is having vigorous sex with his Grindr partner, Wes. When it’s over, the much younger Wes is smitten, but Jonathan is keen to have his space back to himself.
The arrival of Claire brings only a very tentative welcome, but she’s the sort of woman you can’t really ignore, living her peripatetic life in a flurry of high-fashion “borrows”, extra-marital affairs and lost keys, wallets …
Director Jack Sain contacted Matthew Lopez about staging the play in the UK, and the writer agreed to adapt it for an English setting – probably the longed-for Christmas in the Cotswolds were the Catskills in the original. Bloomingdales was swapped for Selfridges, but the pain of isolation and loneliness were just the same. In a world of unrealistic expectations, phone-chosen hookup sex and family estrangements, it’s getting more and more perilous to trust your human judgements and make meaningful relationships, platonic or otherwise.
Why won’t Jonathan venture outside the confines of his book-strewn flat? What is it that Claire really wants from her life? Can they answer each others’ needs? Just as in The Inheritance, Lopez captures the fragile, tentative intimacy of conversations, peppered with witticisms that draw a veil over fear.
The early reviews of Reverberation at Bristol already underline that this is a show that will divide the audiences – is it worthy of the Telegraph’s five stars, or the Guardians’s tepid ennui?
We at the FTR think it is a remarkable play, brilliantly acted by a trio unafraid to expose not just body parts but deep fears, urgent longing and passionate, dependable love. Michael Ahomka-Lindsay returns to the Old Vic to play the tortured, heartbroken Jonathan, with Jack Gibson’s Wes growing up before our eyes. Eleanor Tomlinson is known to television audiences as the unforgettable Demelza in Poldark. Can she do it on stage, too? Yes, she most certainly can – and does – bringing out the serious depths of the seemingly flighty and irresponsible Claire. It is unmissable theatre, and a joy to see such a powerful UK debut at the Old Vic.
GP-W