The romance is over: Obsession at the Barbican Theatre
Obsession
Barbican Theatre
19 April 2017
Upper Circle CC13, £16
http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=19729
I remember seeing Ivo van Hove's production of A View from the Bridge at the Young Vic and thinking this was a director to revere. Everything I've seen of his since has reminded me of the dangers of idolatry. Rather like David Lynch and Werner Herzog, Van Hove seems to be a director who can make a work of genius and with the same tools make something completely terrible. I thought Van Hove's Hedda Gabler at the National was terrible, and I thought Obsession was terrible, in annoyingly similar ways. Those thumbprints of genius are still there, though, and I know each production has its staunch defenders.
As with Hedda Gabler, the final moments of Obsession overwhelmed me with despair, and not in a good way. On reflection, though, I have to acknowledge that it was really only in the final quarter I decided that I thought what I was seeing was terrible. Up until then I could admire a few of those thumbprints. I spent a lot of time admiring what was being done with sound – indeed, most of the time, as sitting in the far left of the theatre I was unable to see the portion of the stage (surely not more than a sixth) in which most of the action took place. ('Ah ha!', I imagine you saying, 'of course she's not going to like it if she can't see it!'. It's true this didn't help. I'm tempted to argue that in the Barbican there's an awful lot of the stage that can be seen by every seat in the house so why not use that, at least for key scenes – but perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd been sitting in the stalls.)
So I liked the sound, which has the actors heavily miked such that their voices seem disembodied, in a sense removed from the actors themselves. Could this have been the unintentional effect of over-miking? You could argue it either way, but there was definitely someone with a speedy finger on the channels working very sharply with other stage effects. These all felt slick, at least to start with; moments where Jude Law as Gino and Gijs Scholten van Aschat as the husband Giuseppe seem to shadow each other, done subtly enough that they could be considered accidental correspondences. Perhaps they were, but they still gave me something to think about and admire.
But I got bored of admiring these peripheralities and when that happened the heart of the production provided only bitter gall. I could find no artistic rationale for the actors' deliberately stilted delivery, such that it struck me as distasteful affectation. There were numerous other Van Hove-y ticks – use of gloopy fluids, rubbish strewn around the stage by an angry female character – that maybe only felt so insufferably banal because of how similar they were to the ticks of Hedda Gabler, where they had a similar emptiness. Design elements specific to Obsession – Jude Law confined to a tread mill for several passages, extended full-bleed use of live film – felt on the one hand wilfully ugly and distracting, on the other despairingly unoriginal. The main design element was an engine suspended above the stage: a sword of Damacles written in red pen and underlined twice with scare quotes to make sure you didn't miss it. It had all the grinding unsubtlety of Rafe Spall spitting tomato juice in Ruth Wilson's face at the end of Hedda Gabler, and made me seriously doubt whether all the dry precision I'd been admiring earlier was purely in the eye of the beholder. It reminds me of the ten minutes I once spent admiring a dropped tissue in an empty room in a white-box art gallery, unable to discern the difference between art and crap.
Crucially I found Obsession outrageously dull, which, given the steamy story, is quite an achievement on Van Hove's part. With no dramatic momentum, a collection of directorial ticks that I know I think are meaningless, and a small set of possibly slick steps of dubious intentionality, Obsession left me as miserable as Hedda Gabler. Van Hove, can I ever forgive you?
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