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ONE HAND CLAPPING Send This Review to a Friend
As one enters the theater one sees sitting quietly on stage actress Eve Burley, looking chic and beautiful, and soon clad in a mink coat that she dons. She is there for a long time. Then suddenly she begins the play and what emerges in her rapid-fire narrative dialogue that rushes at us is the tone of an ordinary housewife who has been living in a council flat. As Janet Shirley, Burley launches into “my story and whether you believe it or not is your business and not mine.”
So begins “One Hand Clapping,” adapted for the stage and directed by Lucia Cox from the 1961 novel that Anthony Burgess wrote under the nom de plume Joseph Kell. The production is part of the 2015 Brits Off Broadway festival at 59E59 Theaters.
The play turns out to be a lacerating dark comedy that strikes at an assortment of targets related to the skewered culture and consumerism that Burgess saw characterizing life in Britain at the time, and Cox is solidly on that critical wavelength. Janet is married to Howard Shirley, played somberly by Oliver Devoti, who has a photographic memory, making him made for the kind of pop quiz shows broadcast and offering riches to the winners. Howard goes on such a program, hosted with smarmy broadness by Adam Urey as affable Laddie O’Neill. Howard, of course, succeeds.
Urey subsequently doubles as the ardent Redvers Glass, a friend who gets hot for Janet, who returns the favor. Meanwhile, the story is sprinkled with a variety of observations about the lives the Shirleys lead, and Howard gets increasingly obsessed with wanting to protest against the lack of real values that he sees pervasively corrupting society. He is, in fact, going around the bend with his stoic personal crusade.
Howard arrives at the decision that he and Janet have had everything there has been to live for, so, in protest, they should leave the world. He has planned to the last detail how they are to commit suicide.
As we have already learned from the marvelously spirited performance by Burley as Janet, the good wife is not ready to go quietly into the night, and the play takes a delightfully macabre turn.
“One Hand Clapping” is neatly presented on the tiny stage, and as it moves along, one can get increasingly taken with the performances, all three very good, but that of the highly attractive and skillful Burley exceptionally so. Meriel Pym’s simple but effective stage design and just the right costumes hit the mark, including the clever use of television sets. This edition of the British Off Broadway invasion is most welcome. At 59E59 Theaters, 59 East 59th Street. Phone: 212-279-4200. Reviewed May 14, 2015.
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