Decades before ‘Bridgerton’, Peter Brook taught us that the stories we tell on stage and film can be colour blind. In ‘Visit from an Unknown Woman’ Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s short story of nearly the same name, playing at Hampstead Theatre, the lead character is played, subtly, by Natalie Simpson. The male lead, James Corrigan, with whom she is obsessed, Hampton re-imagines as Zweig himself. Zweig was one of those legions of cultured Viennese and German Jews who felt more Venetian/ German than Jewish until Hitler branded them with a single identity. As the narrative progresses, Stefan realises he cannot, as a Jew, continue to live in Vienna. His beloved city is becoming unsafe. Now this is where the casting becomes problematic. Simpson, who plays the unknown woman, Marianne, is black. And blacks too were persecuted and killed by the Nazi regime and yet Marianne seems remarkably unaware of any such danger. This is, I feel, a lost dramatic opportunity.
The original story is written as a letter of revelation. A woman tells a man she has loved him, and only him, since she was thirteen. And then tells him how her heart was repeatedly broken that he didn’t remember her. Hampton plays with the order of things. In the play we open with the meeting of the two lovers ten years after their first meeting. In the short story, Marainne’s first words to her lover and us are: ‘Meine Kind ist gestern gestorben / Yesterday, my child died.’
In the Hampstead brochure, Hampton says he was haunted by Zweig’s story from when he first read it as a young boy. And clearly, Zweig’s story has themes which connect to Hampton’s perhaps most famous work ‘Dangerous Liaisons’: power, obsession, the entrapment of frivolity, and pain borne like a badge of honour. Hampton also says that he tried to interest Andrew Lloyd Weber into making the Zweig story into a musical. Hampton, aside from being a playwright and screenplay writer, is also a translator (though he didn’t translate this particular story) and a librettist. As both a translator and librettist he must be attuned to the musicality of words. And the original Zweig story abounds in music.’ Jetzt habe ich nur Dich mehr auf der Welt, nur Dich, der Du von mir nichts weisst./ Now I’ve only got you left in the world, only you, you who knows nothing about me.’ That music, that dance that Marianne has with herself, is, here lost. She seems to have just one or two registers and since the play makes or breaks on the fluidity of her character, it is not, I think, enough to hold up the play for its entirety.
Though Hampton does women well, with sympathy, Marianne here comes across, almost, though not quite, as an object of pity. In the short story, the language she uses gives her more agency. ‘Dieses Leben…erst begann mit dem Tage, da ich Dich konnte/ This life first began the day I met you.’ The German is richer because it, like French, makes a distinction between knowing things (wissen) and knowing people (kennen). So, when a lover says ‘ich konnte Dich’ it has both the regular meaning and another layer of meaning.
The staging felt Pinteresque, with its opening and closing of doors and turning on and off lights. There were moments of great intimacy between the lovers but there were equally, moments which felt staged, for instance, the raising of a dress to reveal a bare leg. Maybe another body part- the back of a neck? – would have served us with more uniqueness? The revelation Marianne makes about her son and the shower of white rose petals which fall onto the stage near the end of the play were both unsurprising and by this point, I wanted, desperately, to be surprised. But maybe it’s not that kind of play.
Hampton’s Stefan comes across as deeply self-absorbed, even though he is broken by Marianne’s last revelation. And we are left wondering why Marianne invested her big soul in a man of such meagre spirit. Though, perhaps, in our heart of hearts, we know the answer to that question, too.
There are dramatic beats; the bodies entwine and separate and this breaks Marianne’s near monologue; there is a third character, on stage- the butler, and a fourth character, off stage- the dead child, and this allows for other narratives beyond the main narrative of an engulfing love, and time shifts in interesting ways. And yet, there is, for all this, a sense of sameness.