Quartet’s top performances, but all a little empty

SERENADING LOUIE, Lowry, Salford

Lanford Wilson isn’t well known in this country, nor indeed in America, despite winning a Pulitzer prize.

The Missouri-born, New York-dwelling playwright and librettist was one of the main drivers of New York’s insular Off-Off Broadway movement, which saw actors setting up scratch companies to perform in tiny halls and cafes in the Bohemian sections of New York in the Sixties and Seventies. His work could be relatively mainstream or experimental — or, as here, a mix of the two.

This Donmar Warehouse production — the UK premiere — of his 1970 drama about two rather empty couples is occasionally clever, sometimes powerful but mainly just a little empty, despite four strong performances.

Successful lawyer Alex is tired of his wife Gabby, who is gradually being left behind as he climbs the political ladder; meanwhile his university friend Carl is a property millionaire whose wife is cheating on him with his accountant.

The four bemoan their lack of lost youth and vigour as they enter their apparently decrepit mid-thirties, but the problem is that is pretty much all they do all evening — until the end, when Carl takes matters into his own hands in a tragic way that belies his earlier suggestion that he no longer cares about anything.

Wilson’s experimentation in the play consists of offering a fairly linear narrative in which characters share the same physical stage but not necessarily the same room; the single set, in muted Seventies earth tones, serves as both homes. Wilson also plays with the idea, unusual in theatre, more common on TV, of two conversations taking place at once, to convey the supposed realism of his urban Chicago setting.

While the play isn’t very much more than a curiosity — on the level of a good radio or TV play of the period — the four performances are nicely harnessed by director Simon Curtis.

Geraldine Somerville is deceptively and old-money confident as Carl’s wife Mary, and Jason O’Mara as Carl offers an effecting, inwardly hollow man.

Charlotte Emmerson does well with the weakly-written character of Mary, while American Jason Butler Harner offers the authentic US voice and manner missing in the other three.