30 June 2008 Written by Stephe Harrop Print This Post  Email This Post

The Diver is an exploratory fusion of traditional Japanese Noh and contemporary western drama. A woman is accused of murdering her lover’s family, but will speak only in the voices of characters from classical mythology, to the bewilderment and eventual fascination of the psychiatrist who’s trying to establish her responsibility for the crime.

The notion is to look at the ways in which the shades of ancient tales and rituals endure beneath the sophisticated, sleazy veneer of contemporary mores. In fact, the cumbersome drama of policemen, politicians, prison and consulting room does little to support the silken knot of images and allusions which forms the mythological strand of the story.

In the shape-shifting role of Woman, Kathryn Hunter is angry, wounded and fragile, plucking fantasies out of the air with trembling fingers. But the real reason to see this show is Hideki Noda, slightly uncomfortable as the modern Psychiatrist, but who radiates effortless accomplishment once he steps away from the sofa, into his epic personae. As a giggling, childish, vengeful, wronged wife his touch is deft and assured, and the lightheartedness with which he handles this baneful character is utterly confident and chilling.

Hideki Noda, who also directs and writes (with Colin Teevan), evidently has grand ambitions, but sometimes seems to leave the rest of the company behind him in a welter of tumbling fabrics and fumbled fans. Harry Gostelow and Glyn Pritchard work tremendously hard to keep pace with the different segments and styles of the complex story. Gostelow is memorable as a louche playboy princeling, and Pritchard’s blank-faced demon is impressively imposing, but both have the air of actors worrying about the next prop, the next transformation, insufficiently certain about the purpose of alien formalities. Hunter’s physical presence can be fearless and thrilling, but it exists in a totally different register to Noda’s soft-stepping, dreamlike, and self-sufficient playing.

In the end it’s the fragments of ancient stories that resonate most strongly through The Diver, moments of unexplained but intense ambiguity and allusion, moments in which a struggling company manage to touch minds and move together. But the show’s determination to reduce myth and ritual to the level of contemporary mundanity is pedantic, exasperating and self-defeating. Through a barrage of cop-show clichés we catch resonant glimpses of strange tales that feel oddly familiar. But ultimately, in this over-written, over-interpreted drama, glimpses of that world are all we get.

The Diver is at the Soho Theatre until 19 July: www.sohotheatre.com

Image Top: Kathryn Hunter in The Diver. Photograph by Sheila Burnett.

Image Bottom: Harry Gostelow, Kathryn Hunter, Hideki Noda in The Diver. Photograph by Sheila Burnett.