Performance: Wit

Maidment Theatre

Review: Susan Budd


Complexity and simplicity are the prime antagonists in Margaret Edson's play that has won a clutch of prizes in the United States and filled theatres round the world.

Vivian Bearing, a Professor of English whose lifelong study has been the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, the 17th century poet, experiences eight months of torture in the treatment of ovarian cancer by chemotherapy.

Passion has been replaced by punctuation in her marriage to the study of the metaphysical poet, teasing out the meaning conveyed by a single comma, seeking to unveil the truth beneath his complex imagery. She is rigorous, unkind to those she considers stupid and inevitably lonely.

It is a cruel irony that she becomes a subject for research, valued only for her afflicted parts. Because of the toughness of which she is so proud she is made to suffer inordinately in treatment that, while it extends her life, increases her pain.

The long months of treatment are her Calvary, her redemption gained by rejecting erudition and wit for simplicity and kindness.

Ultimately, a children's book containing "a simple allegory of the soul" and the loving kindness of an uneducated nurse, played with generous warmth by Goretti Chadwick, bring her succour.

Wit is absorbing in its play of ideas and oppositions of arguments between the play of intellect and the power of love, between learning and living, thinking and feeling. But for all its initial coruscation, I found it unsatisfying and reductive. For the clever are heartless and only the simple are good. The characters are not allowed complexity, but only reveal opposed aspects of the argument.

Complexity may enrich, not kill feeling and Vivian's deathbed conversion to simplicity comes perilously close to Dickensian sentimentality.

Ilona Rodgers' portrayal of Vivian is strong and clear, but in its containment lacks any intimations of vulnerability until her final descent into the terror of death.

Simon Prast's production is crisp and clear until the final scene, when Vivian walks into what has become a theatrical cliché, a blinding white light to massed choirs of angels.