The drama that did deserve to win was Simon Gray’s The Late Middle Classes which, in its delicate treatment of the relationship between a 12-year-old boy and his platonically paedophile piano teacher, handles the subject of child abuse with all the moral responsibility that is so painfully lacking in Anna Weiss. But it couldn’t get the award because its craven producers decided not to bring it into the West End, preferring to put on a musical about a boy band instead. It comes across not as the final refinement of the play’s epistemology but as a form of moral short- termism.The first night of Michael Attenborough’s ragged, uncharacteristically ill-judged production came just after the Evening Standard Awards lunch. And blow me down, if it doesn’t trigger a complicating memory in the hypnotherapist The shoddiness of this twist is breathtaking. Just as in Oleanna, where a professor is accused of sexual harassment by a PC-demented student, the man here is driven to the point of violence that seems somehow to corroborate the accusation. There are, after all, other types of abuse, besides the sexual.Cullen’s play gestures towards this area, but is too slavishly indebted to sensationalising symmetries of David Mamet’s Oleanna to allow any of the material to breathe. Speaking as the anxious father of three small girls, I have to say I can think of no worse nightmare than of being one day accused of abuse by them.
The essence of the nightmare, though, does not lie in the unfoundedness of such an allegation. It lies in wondering what else you can have done to your poor child to lead her to think these things true. The play dramatises or, rather, melodramatises the eventual confrontation.No drama worth its salt would turn on the simple veracity or otherwise of these recovered memories, and it’s to the credit of Anna Weiss that it refuses to play that game. That, though, is just about the only credit you can accord it.The set-up offers a wonderful opportunity for a penetrating psychological study of the indicted man. Now 27, the daughter, Lynn (Shirley Henderson), has recovered “memories” of this tragic family history while being treated by the eponymous Anna Weiss (Catherine McCormack). It just goes to show that some people prefer celebrity plus the likelihood of a beating-up to safety as a sad nobody.
There are no smiles even of this wan variety in Mike Cullen’s Anna Weiss.
The charity of the incidental, unincriminating detail and of human suppleness is not a part of its dramatic method. It trains its lens on a threesome: the infernal triangle of “victim”, hypnotherapist and a man accused of appalling sexual abuse of his daughter. Take the case of Gary Glitter, who was jailed recently for possessing pornographic images of children. News reports have indicated that he has been allowed to keep his “trademark wig” on in prison.
You would have thought that a man in his circumstances would want to put as many miles as possible between himself and any identifying accoutrement. He’s also very unassuming; when we recently stopped off in order to see an elderly relative of mine, he spent the visit discussing with her the best way to replace her carpets rather than boasting about his expeditions He really is an incredible one-off person.. ANNA WEISS WHITEHALL THEATRE LONDON
CHILD-ABUSE is, God knows, laugh-free territory, but sometimes details on the outskirts of the subject can raise a bleak smile. While my husband and I were building our bungalow, Ran must have noticed that it was beginning to get me down because one weekend he and Ginny arrived unannounced to help us with the plasterboarding. We certainly don’t discuss life and the universe together.My function is to make my boss’s life easier and his day run smoother But I don’t work as hard as Ran does He is absolutely non-stop and never wastes even a second. He likes to be busy and if I can get him away from Exmoor at the crack of dawn to do a morning, afternoon and evening presentation in London, returning in the early hours of the next day, he would consider it to be an ideal use of his time.My admiration for what he has achieved is coupled with my respect for his personal kindness.
