Review: The Fever - The Jewish Chronicle

More a lecture than a monologue, more a stream of troubled consciousness than a play, the inaugural offering of the Royal Court’s Wallace Shawn season makes no bones about who is causing all the misery in the world.

It is you. You who sit in your comfortable sitting-room reading this review in the smug certainty that all you own is what you deserve.

And it is me, too, along with the 388 other members of the Royal Court’s audience who, on this press night, sat in stamina-sapping shame while being told by the unnamed traveller in Shawn’s play (Clare Higgins) that all wealth, no matter how modest, is the cause of all poverty.

Shawn’s protagonist is a role that can be played by a man or a woman and which the author was the first to perform in the living rooms of his New York friends in the early ’90s.

He — or in this case, she — is staying in a hotel located in a country that practises capital punishment and tortures those whom it considers to be a threat. “It is the only way to control people who don’t fear death,” says Higgins’s American. No, this is not the United States under Bush. This is a poor country, although director Dominic Cooke gives no clues as to where it is.

His production presents Shawn’s play on a set-less stage. There are a few chairs strewn around, a ladder leans against the far brick wall and there is a water-cooler from which Higgins, dressed in blouse and jeans, fills a cup and takes occasional sips.

Physical theatre, this ain’t — more like ninety uninterrupted minutes of “mea culpa”.

The traveller describes her (and our) life of materialism at home viewed through the prism of her experiences abroad. Abroad is where she encountered the optimism of revolution and the repression of authoritarianism. And, like Shawn — whose play was in part inspired by his visits to Central America in the 1980s — abroad is where the traveller has learned the link between how we live and how others — such as her unseen chambermaid — suffer. “The chambermaid’s condition is not temporary,” she says guiltily. “A life sentence has been passed on her.”

There are also memories, or imaginings, of being beaten up by revolutionary guards who hold her, as a rich Westerner, responsible for the condition which makes revolution necessary. She is guilty of, as Marx called it, the “fetishism of commodities”. We judge, she explains, the value of a coat not by its history — consisting of the people who made it — but the price tag.

It is a fair point. Could anyone concerned with how wealth in the West is created by child labour in the East disagree? But if The Fever serves as a protest play in an era of G20 demonstrations, like those demonstrators, it does not offer much in the way of alternatives. Yes, we all like to think of ourselves as good people. No, not so good that we will give poor people our money. This traveller’s observations may be the stuff of many a revolution, but this is hardly revolutionary stuff.

All this is delivered as part-confession and part-accusation intended to make a middle-class theatre audience squirm — always an honourable exercise. But it is an exercise that is wrapped up here in a bleak rejection of theatrical convention. So no music, or even, as might work well in a hotel, Muzak.

Yet Higgins soldiers on valiantly, shifting between bewilderment and anger, sometimes drumming up an energy that approaches the evangelical. And using these variations as his cue, Cooke modulates his production — as much as any long speech can be modulated — with subtle variations in lighting.

The result is an evening of Beckett-like austerity, with anything that might be superficially entertaining rejected. Director and author have placed a wilful trust in the drama of words, but only occasionally is their trust repaid.

“Have you ever had any friends who are poor?” asks the traveller, who loves the egalitarian notion of having poor friends and accepting their invitations to dinner, yet knows that such contact will result in her secret, hypocritical revulsion.

But for all the self-knowledge on display, Shawn’s protagonist does not turn out to be quite the font of wisdom I suspect the playwright believes she/he to be.

“My sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor,” his character says. This much is probably true.

“Parents who teach their children good values don’t change the life of the poor.” That one I could argue with.

“And artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.” No argument there.