So much money is now spent on creating spectacles for
theatergoers that we sometimes forget that all that’s really needed are a play
with something to say and actors who know how to say it. At least that’s all
that proves necessary to make the revival of David Hare’s 1996 play Skylight
starring Bill Nighy and Carrie Mulligan one of the most exquisite experiences
of this theater season.
The play unfolds over a wintry night in the drab and
barely heated London apartment of a young schoolteacher named Kyra who is
visited by her much older and much, much wealthier former lover Tom (his car
and driver wait for him, unseen, outside the building).
On the surface, the plot is simple. Years earlier Tom and
his wife hired the 18-year-old Kyra to work at one of their tony restaurants
and she became a virtual member of their family. But the older man and younger woman began a
six-year affair that ended only when the wife found out and Kyra fled, cutting off
all contact with the family. Now the wife has died and Tom wants Kyra back.
But Hare has never been a surface kind of playwright. While he
explores the tangle of love and betrayal, grief and guilt that connect Tom and
Kyra, he also delves into the larger morass of class, income
disparity and social responsibility.
The broader politics are made personal in the choices Tom, a self-made man, and Kyra, in self-imposed exile from middle-class life, have made. And they're also underscored by Bob Crowley’s evocative set, in which the poor
neighborhood where Kyra lives forms a visible and enveloping presence in the background.
Skylight is nearly all talk (although Kyra prepares and
cooks a spaghetti dinner onstage; so don’t see the show hungry) but the talk is riveting:
sometimes angry, often funny, always insightful. And under Stephen Daldry’s deft direction, Nighy
and Mulligan make a feast of it.
Although he’s best known in this country for movies like “Love
Actually” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” Nighy is a veteran stage actor
in Britain and has a long association with Hare (click here to listen to the two of them discuss that).
But the last time Nighy was on Broadway, he appeared
opposite Julianne Moore in The Vertical Hour and seemed to reign himself in so
as not to overpower Moore in what turned out to be her shaky Broadway debut. But he’s gloriously unleashed here and it’s a
marvel to behold.
Tall, gangly and vibrating with energy, Nighy’s
Tom is unable to stand still, posing, preening, kicking in chairs, twisting his
face into grins and grimaces, all in a desperate—and mesmerizing—effort to woo Kyra back and all the while fearful that he can't.
I saw Michael Gambon, who recently announced his retirement
from the stage, in the original 1996 production of Skylight and Gambon used his
bulk to make Tom a more solid and imposing presence. Both interpretations work but I—and even my
husband K—found Nighy’s to be utterly seductive.
The role of Kyra is less flashy but Mulligan is no less
compelling. I first fell in live with her when her performance as Nina in the 2008 production of The Seagull literally reinvented Chekhov
for me (click here to read my review).
Hare has said that he’s turned down requests from numerous other
actresses to play Kyra but got excited when he heard that Mulligan wanted to
do it and his instincts prove right.
Mulligan roots Kyra’s determination to do
good in a compassion for the less fortunate but she also makes it clear that Kyra’s
decisions are a way to atone for her past wrongs and to insulate herself from
future ones. It’s a quietly devastating
performance.
Of course Mulligan, too, has a flourishing movie career and so
this production is only scheduled to run at the Golden Theatre through June 21.
It’s selling out but you should do what you can to get a ticket because it's the kind of spectacle you really should see.
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