UR TV CAST

What does what I want matter? We’re all brought up on bloody want… What do you want for your birthday? What do you want for your wedding?… Do you want to forget your birthday? Do you want to forget thinking so hard and constantly about what you want?” Insofar as it’s an attack on greed, Laura’s long comic rant in the second scene does her credit, but insofar as it’s symptomatic of a woman who needs to think that her own needs need not come into play, it augurs ill for her fundamentally unequal relationship with Eddie, who has lost everything including access to his little daughter.An ironic fate, then, for such a heroine, that through a series of misapprehensions, she should end up being ritually humiliated by her drunken ex-lover in front of an appalled family, her attempted kindness dismissed as “all middle-class wank Do something for some poor sod like me Feel good about yourself… “You don’t know where it’s going to end.”
It is Michael’s schoolteacher sister, Laura, whose painful experience might seem to bear out this ruling, although the play implies that things needn’t have been so bad if she could have acknowledged from the start that pure altruism is often an illusion and that, in the relationship between benefactor and recipient, it can be extremely tricky deciding who is using whom.Quite against the rules of the day centre for homeless people where she does voluntary work, Laura has taken in one of its clients. “Never, never get involved with somebody like that,” Roanna snaps. His like-minded wife Roanna (Elizabeth Garvie) is duly appalled when she discovers that their 17-year-old son (Toby Ross-Bryant) has been doing good turns for the unkempt, scene-creating schizophrenic woman (Maggie McCarthy) who has a bedsit in the house next door. But the decision to present Giselle as a morbidly sensitive and acutely vulnerable individual is sustained with such thoroughness and conviction that one is forced to view the lack of gaiety in the role not as a failing, but as a new and terrible strength..

Well-heeled Michael (Rupert Frazer) thinks that simply because he pays income tax he’s entitled to an exemption from considering the needs of people whose lives are in a mess. You would have to be very thick-skinned indeed not to wince with recognition during Clare McIntyre’s The Thickness of Skin. Premiered now in Hettie Macdonald’s beautifully acted production, it’s this author’s first play in six years and it quickly establishes itself as the most searching look at the problems, perils and mixed motives attendant on offering help to the unfortunate since David Hare’s The Secret Rapture (1988). Wildor, like Jewkes, manages to combine the stiff technical demands of Giselle’s ghostly persona with the ethereally droopy wrists and submissive head so necessary for the successful evocation of the afterlife.If there is a flaw in her performance, it is in the absence of unalloyed girlish joy in her first act to contrast with the woe of the second. The cloud of corn-silk blonde hair, the bee-stung mouth and trembling lower lip make her appear on the verge of tears at the best of times; when driven mad by the thoughtless betrayal of her aristocratic lover, her misery is shared at the back of the stalls Her performance in Act 2 was equally successful. Her obvious terror of physical contact carries echoes of her fine interpretation of MacMillan’s violated virgin in The Invitation. Despite this, she can give a performance of astonishing power and sensitivity.

One shudders to think what she could do with the role if she had more time to work on it. Last year’s partner was the posturing and unresponsive Zoltan Solymosi, who has since left the company. His place has been taken by the handsome home-grown Stuart Cassidy, who suited her far better.Endearing as a kitten, Wildor’s Giselle is a child-like creature only truly happy when dancing solo. The neophyte Giselle comes among them and Jewkes excels here in the adagio passages, which she inhabits with a somnambulistic languor until her body finally dips and folds back down into her early grave.
The Royal Ballet’s Sarah Wildor danced Giselle twice at Covent Garden last year She is dancing it twice this year. If she plays her cards right, she might get a couple of goes in 1997.