Advance reports of people fainting in the stalls suggested we might be in for something shockingly sensational. The blunt truth, however, is that Martin Crimp’s play – subtitled “12 Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela” – proves to be a diagrammatic exploration of modern sexual mores shorn of any social context.
It is left to the admirably uninhibited central performers, Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane, to literally put some flesh on a drily cerebral text. Richardson’s 1740 novel shows a 15-year-old serving girl resisting a predatory master before finally marrying him.
Under Katie Mitchell’s agile production and Vicki Mortimer’s design, the action is shifted to a modern garage, where Blanchett and Dillane – simply characterised as Woman and Man – enact a series of sadomasochistic power games.
The Man, asserting his economic authority, emerges as a patriarchal bully; the Woman, seeking freedom through recording her ideas on a laptop, strikes a note of mocking defiance. But the pair constantly swap roles so that she dons his clothes and air of toxic repressiveness while he submits to her while sporting a blonde wig, black underwear and a maid’s costume.
We live, Crimp implies, in a world where gender is fluid, sex becomes a form of domination, and the balance of power between men and women is rapidly shifting. There is nothing surprising about the argument. But first-rate drama depends on a collision of equal forces, and that is where Crimp’s play breaks down. The Man, seeking to imprison his victim like Richardson’s Lord B or offering material wealth in exchange for freedom, simply emerges as a neurotic weakling easily outwitted by the woman’s resilience.
When the roles are reversed, the Woman assumes a brisk masculinity while he, in female garb, seems curiously defenceless. However valid the point, it makes for an uneven contest.
Fortunately, the two actors are highly watchable. Blanchett has an extraordinary capacity to shift vocal and physical registers. As a woman she seems wily, guileful and undefeated: when she strokes the man’s thigh with an elegantly stockinged foot she invests the gesture with irony and even makes her fetishistic assumption of a wedding dress feel like an act of protest. But when she becomes the male tormentor, she makes expressive use of deep chest-notes without ever lapsing into vicious caricature. As we know from her previous work in film and theatre, she is a consummate actor.
Dillane has the tougher task in that the Man, even when supposedly bossing the show, is always on the back foot. However, Dillane, with his bony features and disordered mass of greying hair, has the ability to make the male illusion of power interesting, and there is good support from Jessica Gunning as his housekeeper, who seizes on a hint in Richardson’s novel to suggest a lesbian fascination with her master’s prisoner.
Mitchell’s production is sexually explicit, but I can only assume that anyone shocked by the play’s arguments about the overthrow of oppressive masculinity and the malleability of gender must have spent the last decade in monastic seclusion.
• At the Dorfman, London, until 2 March.