Gate, London
Freud isn't so fashionable these days, but you can see what once made his ideas compelling. Arthur Schnitzler's Dream Story (which Kubrick filmed as Eyes Wide Shut) is Freud's theories made heaving flesh, and Anna Ledwich's new production shows that, when sex, dreams and shame are invoked, plenty can still be revealed about the human animal. Ledwich has turned the novella into a cool but nightmarish four-hander, which draws us into its antihero's sexual imagination with miasmic effectiveness.
The story begins with bourgeois Viennese doctor Fridolin and his wife Albertina confessing fantasies to one another. No harm in that, you might think. But those intimacies, and Fridolin's rejection of Albertina's amorous advances ? he's scared their infant daughter might catch them at it ? disturb something in the couple's sexual status quo. Cue a long, dark night of sordid behaviour for the doctor, who is propositioned by the daughter of a deceased patient, visits a prostitute, then gatecrashes an illicit sex party. It's like Jekyll and Hyde minus the potions: his sex drive and his civility are at war for possession of Fridolin's sleepless soul.
Under Ledwich's precise direction, his panic is keenly felt. The need to cast the same actors in different roles is made a virtue: Fridolin's sex slave looks like his wife; his friend looks like his enemy; hallucination is indistinct from reality. Helen Goddard's claustrophobic set and Adrienne Quartly's disorientating soundscape heighten the sickliness as Fridolin's fears and desires swarm into life. The cast are uniformly strong, particularly Leah Muller as Albertina, narrating to her husband a night vision more real and more treacherous than his blundering infidelities. "No dream is entirely a dream," Fridolin concludes, and the play credulously concurs. The theory may be creaky, but Ledwich's potent production brings it to persuasive life.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jun/22/dream-story-review
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