The Driver's Seat
Seen at Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh
Transferring to Tramway, Glasgow,
July 2-4
Reviewed by Mark Brown
Muriel Spark's intense "whydunnit" The Driver's Seat is a fascinating choice for stage adaptation by the National Theatre of Scotland's artistic director Laurie Sansom. Published in 1970, this short experimental thriller about Lise, an alienated, lonely and deeply distressed office worker with a death wish, could be read as a disturbing concession to violent, male psycho-sexual fantasies.
However, that would be to reckon without the sophistication and reverberating ambiguities of Spark's writing. There are boxes within boxes in the novella. The beauty of this staging is that it finds a theatrical form to reflect the style of Spark's prose.
In Sansom's tightly-wrought, unsettling, 90-minute production, Lise (played with compelling jaggedness by Morven Christie) travels alone to an Italian city, seemingly in search of a male companion as yet unknown to her. Dressed like a candy cane, her strident directness and brittle vulnerability attract worryingly strange men like Bill, a sinister macrobiotics advocate (played with revolting oiliness by Ryan Fletcher), and Richard, a stranger with an alarmingly dubious reputation (Michael Thomson in memorably sympathetic yet repugnant form).
Lise's motivations are as inscrutable as her unhappiness is palpable - a paradox which is typical of the production as a whole.
The piece combines a clarity of expression with an affecting opacity of meaning. Its short, sharp scenes and concise characterisations combine powerfully with conspicuous, on-stage filming. Consequently, one feels uncomfortably close to Lise's increasingly ominous encounters with members of the opposite sex, yet locked out of her thought processes.
One's bleak attraction to Christie's excellent performance is only possible due to the impressive mutual compatibility of every element of the show. From the perfectly paced ensemble to Ana Ines Jabares Pita's evocative-yet-utilitarian set, everything seems to swirl around the young protagonist, whose broken soul and fractured mind are dragging her inexorably towards an early grave.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article