Review: SPANISH ORANGES starring Maryam d'Abo, Playground Theatre

In a half-unpacked house in Camden that reeks of contingency and impermanence just where a foundation for a marriage should be, a journalist arrives to interview a writer. She’s publishing her fourth novel in a successful but stop-start career and is on edge after enduring a hatchet job last time out. 

The first curiosity is that she insists that they sit not facing each other, but instead more like the classic psychotherapist’s set up, neither looking into the eyes, but with a chair instead of the clichéd couch. That conversation tilts and wobbles as the power dynamics shift and we pretty much stop believing in what we’re seeing. That’s all right though, because we’re not actually seeing what we’re seeing… 

Spanish Oranges is Alba Arikha’s first play after a successful career as a novelist, academic and songwriter, but there’s plenty of experience in the director’s chair occupied by Miriam Cyr. Despite that (possibly as a consequence of the amusingly clever unreliability of the opening scene) the credibility that must attend on an indictment of a failing marriage keeps sliding away. Real problems need real people in which we can invest, and I just couldn't see any.

Maryam d’Abo lends Fiona a suspicious wariness, the writer appearing to bounce continually between a desire to underpin her art and her career with the publicity the book needs and a fear of opening up a can of worms just about fading in the public’s memory. She resents the fact that she is an innocent party in that mess but knows, with some bitterness, that the press serve not the public interest, but the public’s interest - a rather different matter altogether.

What they (disappointingly, inevitably) are eager to learn about is the fading, but not forgotten, #MeToo scandal that led to her husband, Ivo, a once famous actor, to be cancelled. Jay Villiers is very good at mixing victimhood, entitlement and duplicity to build a man who, though he has the odd quip, proves unpleasant company over the 90 minutes all-through runtime. There’s no escaping the fact that boors are boring.

As the misery cranks up, some relief arrives in the form of their daughter Lydia, somewhat improbably pitching up from university in Newcastle before it's midday in Camden. At first Arianna Branca lightens the mood, but she, understandably, also turns on her father, long since established as a shit of the first order. Only the explosive denouement remained, turning on a plot device that had been relentlessly signalled but still proved wholly unbelievable in its execution, nevertheless ensuring comeuppance is served.

Do we need another #MeToo play almost ten years on from its bursting the bubble of silence? Do we need another examination of social media’s power to cancel actors, for good or ill? In the midst of the unfolding horrors in The Epstein Files’ revelations, can the sort of relationship that cracks this marriage apart shock us enough to sustain the drama? I’m not sure.

The world certainly does need plays that examine relationships in an ever-evolving social context in which women can still be pigeonholed, victimised and abused by powerful (and ex-powerful) men, but the flaws in this drama suggest that this is not the one to do so.

Spanish Oranges is at the Playground Theatre until 7 March