The Girl in the Yellow Dress @ The Citizens

It was pretty sweet bumping into a party of students from the school where I used to teach. I remember leading trips like that, and I think the kids did pretty well to stifle their laughter in Act III when the male protagonist started shouting about coming on his beloved’s tits. When I was a pupil, a scene like that would inevitably have led to an appointment with the headmaster and a lecture about being an ambassador for the school.

Still, it was good catching up with my old colleagues after The Girl in the Yellow Dress. When I mentioned how well his students had coped, he replied that this remained to be seen. He has visions of them explaining the plot to their parents – well, this kind of stalker seduced a women who had incestuous fantasies about her brother. In Paris – or recounting nightmares to the counsellor. “He seemed like a nice African art history student wanting to learn English, then he got all rape-y in the second act.”

Anxieties about the filth we are feeding our kids these days aside, Craig Higginson’s play is a brief survey of modern romance, compressed into symbolic insanities for that all important dramatic tension. The cast knock it out of the park, although my former colleagues prefer Nat Ramabula’s naive Pierre, while I am entranced by Marianne Oldham’s ability to flicker through a gamut of emotions, from flirtatious to totally disturbed. This might have been a question of perspective though: the small space at the Tron was not well used, with characters often facing away from the audience, shielding their expressions. That might work for a more mysterious script, but much of the pleasure tonight was the facial tics of the actors, and any play that has characters confessing to kleptomania, stalking and porno-style sex can’t claim to be enigmatic.

The script’s conceit is based around a series of lessons, and the intrusion of precise grammatical language gave a poetic resonance to the repressed emotions, weird sexual histories and mind games. Unfortunately, the consummation of the relationship makes like a horny teenager – it is embarrassing and comes far too quickly. Suddenly, the secrets and lies and racial stereotypes and sexual perversions are flying around like paper aeroplanes in my old remedial Latin class and the suggestive tension evaporates.

I do wonder what the students learnt. I might recognise the compulsive intensity of desire, the sudden disappointment after climax and the mutual incomprehension of the post-coital couple, but I hope that they don’t, yet. I wonder whether they could understand why Celia even went for Pierre. Even I found him creepy. The Girl in the Yellow Dress tries a little too hard to make a statement about love, and the vaguely optimistic ending sells out the mania that the early scenes conjure.