Aunt Dan And Lemon, Royal Court
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Lemon recalls her childhood and a charismatic adopted Aunt, who filled her young head full of tales of hedonism and decadence, stories that would leave a sinister legacy.
REVIEW
She sits there, as pale as a ghost and as gleeful as a schoolgirl with a secret. But there's a twist with Lemon. She's a poisonous Pollyanna.
Lemon's titillating praise for all things clean and necessary - including genocide - and her revulsion for all things phony and hypocritical - such as compassion - is told with such delicious lucidity that the whey-faced recluse in her isolated flat make us complicit in her sinister thesis.
This is where playwright Wallace Shawn wants us. Dumbstruck as he seduces with tales from the dark side, testing the tolerance of our liberal passivity. Charm is an essential part of misdirection, he seems to say.
A younger Lemon is our guide on this journey. She is as white and blank as a piece of paper, onto which is imprinted the amoral worldview of characters delivered to her through a series of anecdotes and diatribes by hedonist and bombast Aunt Dan (a charismatic Lorraine Ashbourne).
As adult Lemon, Jane Horrocks is captivating when she needs us pliable, but as younger Lemon she is translucent, her childish reactions serving only to re-orientate our moral compass when we get turned around in this whirlpool of sleaze.
Shawn's baggy flashback structure embraces all comers, from Scarlett Johnson's cut-glass femme fatale to Mary Roscoe's saintly Mother whose artless compassion is no match for Aunt Dan's battering ram of hard-edged verbiage.
So we're treated to a patchwork of Potter-esque recollections of hats and spats and insect hum summers, all filtered through Aunt Dan and wrapped up in silky riffs on subjects such as the banality of evil, the honesty of the Holocaust and the humility of Henry Kissinger.
The bombardment of words - so many words - is meant to void our judgment too. The insistent direction by Dominic Cooke pursues the theme and Lemon's drab flat seamlessly becomes a jazz club, a frazzled family dinner, a noirish murder scene without a moment to reflect.
Ultimately, the play expends vast amounts of energy taking us not very far from Lemon's opening argument. But round trips are about the voyage not the destination, and this one was pleasurable, if uncomfortable. Like walking to the sweet shop and back with a stone in your shoe.
– First published on wharf.co.uk on May 31
