Cold: The Inheritance Part 2
The Inheritance Part 2
Noël Coward Theatre
Balcony A22, £15, seat-hopped to Royal Circle C26
2 November 2018
Inheritance page
I approach the writing of this with a certain amount of dread. Can I explain why The Inheritance left me cold? Are my reasons good enough, to withstand the tidal wave of opinion in the opposite direction? Was I unfair? Did I miss something? Am I simply insensitive?
Two scenes in Part 2 stand apart from The Inheritance as a whole. The first came near enough the beginning to make me think perhaps I had been wrong about Part 1. A robust debate storms between an older, Trump-voting gay man and a troupe of younger, Clinton-voting gay men, over the 2016 election and on the central balance between self and community. As with everything that has gone before there are a lot of words, writer Matthew Lopez cramming the mouths of his actors full, but this time there is also a sincere engagement with a differing political opinion. The Republican ultimately loses but victory is hard-won and ambiguous; for a few fleeting moments it is not crystal clear what Lopez wants us to think. ‘Perhaps this is more interesting than I thought’, I thought, for the last time.
The second came towards the end, and causes me anguish. For the first time in five hours of stage time someone who is not a man appears. She happens to be Vanessa Redgrave, hunched now by age, with an American South accent that perhaps veers occasionally towards Australian if you’re uncharitable. She plays brusque old lady with the young men around her before delivering a monologue remembering her son, born when she was 17, raised by her alone, whom she rejected when discovering he was gay, whom she saw only once more, on the day of his death aged 25. Even now just writing that ugly summary I find myself filling with sadness. Why should this story touch me when none of Lopez’s others do? I hate the idea that because as a woman I need to see a woman; and I’m not greatly more comfortable with the fact that this is the play’s only AIDS-related death dwelled on at length.
But these are the facts: aside from that moment of intellectual engagement, and that moment of emotional engagement, Part 2 left me as unconvinced as Part 1. So you have loads of Howard’s End references; so you have an undeniably impressive, seemingly endless torrent of words; so you have an engaging story and memorable characters; so you even have a moral, to savour community and social ties, which I like and admire. What more do I want? Isn’t that enough?
No. Not for me, at least not for a play of this ambition, that asks so much of my time. There remains the vexed woman question: why just one? Why just that one? Is it just to have a misery mother monologue? Isn’t that a bit manipulative? There remains the fact that Lopez tells me a load of things to think about his lead triumvirate of Eric, Toby and Leo/Adam that I just don’t buy. Why do I have to think of Eric as a saint? Why must Toby be sacrificed? Isn’t the duality of Leo/Adam rather heavy-handed? Isn’t the deal with the play-within-a-play-within-a-novel-within-a-writing-class whatever a bit lame? Did you have to give both Eric and Leo such happy-ever-after endings?
The uniform standing ovation pretty much the moment the lights went down suggests I was alone in my scepticism, which brings me back to: am I unfair, what did I miss, am I insensitive? Was I wrong to see the seams; what could I have done to hide them? The Inheritance seems to have touched a lot of people: if you’re one of them, please explain to me why we disagree in the comments below. Don’t leave me hanging.
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