Switzerland is the somewhat unhelpfully titled play about the last days of the ghastly, wonderful US novelist Patricia Highsmith. Although usually described as a crime or thriller writer, Highsmith was much more. She was also an unquestionably nasty piece of work, many of whose works were nasty pieces. Although her Tom Ripley books were commercially successful and are her best known, they are actually a small part of her output: just five of a diverse catalogue of 22 novels.
Among other things, Pat, as she was known, was mean-spirited, sexually voracious, hard-drinking, grudge-bearing, bitter and misanthropic ‒ all qualities that inform her work and are not glossed over in Joanna Murray-Smith’s tightly written stage thriller, which focuses on her last days. Although not true to the facts of her life, it is true to her character.
The play has a complicated pedigree. It was commissioned from the author by Los Angeles’ Geffen Playhouse, but for various reasons premiered in 2014 at the Sydney Theatre Company. The production directed by Sarah Goodes and starring New Zealander Sarah Peirse was repeated in Melbourne two years later. It has since been performed elsewhere and also looks to have an interesting future, with a film version starring Helen Mirren and directed by Anton Corbijn due to go into production soon. The upcoming Auckland Theatre Company production sees both Goodes and Peirse back on board, with Jarred Blakiston as Edward, the other character in this two-hander.
“The [Sydney Theatre] company was caught off guard by how popular it was,” says Goodes of the play’s premiere season. “It was a great production and Sarah was great in it, but it was also an affirmation of a time when people were going, ‘Oh, female lead stories don’t sell.’ So, to have a misanthropic woman growling around on stage and people loving it was a great moment.”
The play takes place toward the end of Highsmith’s life, when she was living, for tax purposes, in Switzerland. Such equilibrium as this has brought her is disrupted when a young man named Edward arrives, dispatched by her publishers to persuade her to write one last Ripley novel.
And that, apparently, is about as much as can be said about what occurs on stage. Talking to the Listener, both director and performer are as ambiguous and evasive as any Highsmith character. Goodes: “I do think it’s really interesting in terms of … Oh I can’t, that’s a spoiler.” Peirse on Edward’s part in the drama: “Oh, he … well, that would be to give it away …”
Nevertheless, there are a few ambiguous hints of what an audience can expect, and, no, you don’t need to be familiar with Highsmith or her books to enjoy the play.
“I guess the play is how Pat wrote, in the sense that it’s not what it appears to be,” says Goodes. “It’s all unreliable narrator or Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, where everything seems normal, and then suddenly, it starts to not be normal. It’s that tilting change of perspective.”
Peirse says: “It helps if you know a bit about her, but also to know nothing about her is equally enthralling in a different way. It’s got a cat and mouse quality, which makes it disturbing.” The word “meta” is thrown into the conversation at one point, without further elucidation.
Goodes is finally a little more forthcoming: “Somebody knocks on the door. She’s conflicted about that. She doesn’t really want him in the house. But she lets him in and it unfolds. And it’s a terrific pas de deux. It’s funny and fast and it’s awful.”
What can be stated with certainty is that the character at the heart of the play is also funny and awful. To hear Peirse describe her, Highsmith was no slouch as an actor herself: “She presented a bunch of different facets to everybody she met. She was very curated in relation to how she framed herself. There’s a level of hostility and aggression alongside a terrible fragility and sad bitterness.” Perfect for a night out.
The Sydney Morning Herald described Peirse’s portrayal as “a virtuosic performance that is at once outrageously funny and genuinely creepy”.
She, of course, has been with Switzerland from the start, as the first actor to play the character, and helped make it what it is. Although Highsmith has since been played by the likes of Phyllis Logan in England and Laura Linney in the US, Goodes says, “That first production is really important in a play. What the actor and a director bring to that forge it in its final process. I feel quite strongly that Sarah’s DNA is in the piece, which is why it’s so exciting to see her revisit it later on.”
Highsmith’s DNA, obviously, is also in the play, although Peirse, who has studied film and interviews of the author as well as reading the biographies, says her portrayal is an impression, not an imitation.
“She’s difficult. I don’t want to paint a horrible picture. She was smart, funny, kind of awful, magnificent, really. She’s terrifying. Playing a real person gives you an incredible amount of material to start layering in. And, just like a writer is selective in some respects, you’re also selective. You’ve only got a certain amount of time.”
Goodes says, “There are a few recordings of her voice and Sarah listened to them a lot. But it was more you want to capture the spirit of the person. That’s why you go to the theatre. Otherwise, you can watch a doco or read a biography.
“You definitely traverse the realities of her life in the play, so it’s biographical in that sense. It’s not just fantasy. And it employs her ways of revealing and concealing.”
Perhaps inevitably, as a play about a writer, it’s also a piece of writing about the process of writing. “As well as being a reading of her life,” says Peirse, “it’s also a descent into what it is to create from within herself.”
And diet tips: “By the end [she died in 1995], she was existing on whisky and beer and cigarettes. The beer was the nutrition. The whisky was the leveller. And the cigarettes were just a necessary structure.”
Peirse’s involvement with the character now stretches over nearly 10 years. How are they getting on these days?
“I’m very fond of her, although it’s slightly trepidatious approaching her again. What was interesting between the first two runs was the way in which it deepened. That paid dividends in the second season. And it’ll be interesting to go in again, with essentially the same team.”
Apart from the actor playing Edward. “But that works really for the piece, because the Edward character arrives into the circumstance. It’ll be interesting seeing how much more stuff has integrated or made its way into the marrow.”
All Highsmith’s books are in print and there are other films in the offing. Part of the play’s appeal can be attributed to the growth in her reputation in recent years, kicked along by the success of the movie Carol, based on her ground-breaking lesbian romance The Price of Salt. Readers and critics are now starting to share her own very high opinion of her work.
“She was much broader and much more than a thriller writer,” says Peirse. “She started off doing comic strips. She had an amazing journey into writing. But she was always an outlier. She was always outside of the situation, by choice as well as by circumstance.”
Goodes: “She was relegated to crime thriller writer in the US. She had a reputation in Europe that was much more comprehensive. She was sophisticated. She was in the same sort of psychological territory as Camus and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. That was where she placed herself. The American literary establishment – I’m almost quoting the play here – didn’t regard her in that same way. There’s a big following in relation to her lesbian literature. But I think also it’s possible that she was somebody who regarded herself as being in the wrong body. She had aspects that we might have translated or manifested differently if she’d been alive or around now.”
It’s not the first time Peirse has played a real person at the centre of crime drama. Her portrayal of murdered mum Honoria Parker in Heavenly Creatures was a highlight of that movie. Latterly, she has been seen most often in TV series such as the Australian Seven Types of Ambiguity and Offspring, and the local Under the Vines. Coming up are two feature films: romcom Addition, filmed in Melbourne, and Went Up the Hill, a ghost story shot in the South Island.
“Australia has been fantastic,” acknowledges Peirse. “I’ve worked there more than here for the past 10 years.”
So, Switzerland is a welcome and rare chance for local audiences to see her on stage. “Now I need to have some decent headspace to get those lines under my belt. That’s a bit of a mountain to climb.”
Switzerland, ASB Waterfront Theatre Auckland, September 19-October 7.
