The Stage

Treats

Published Tuesday 13 March 2007 at 11:40 by Jeremy Austin

Billie Piper hasn’t chosen the easiest of roles for her West End debut, or perhaps it is the way it has been directed - either way, her character Ann is angry for two hours, then cries and then the play ends.

It is a shame because you feel that there probably is a lot more to Piper than this. She does what is asked of her and does it well. But there is something missing. It could be because Christopher Hampton has written the role rigidly, or because Laurence Boswell has directed a monotonous interpretation, but it is, more than likely, just that Piper has not the confidence to play with the role, nor suspects this is expected of her.

Whatever the reason, it is not Piper’s fault that the play underperforms. Where she is angry, barking out the roles in misplaced RP, her fellow performers too clunk around the stage.

Kris Marshall plays Dave, her ex-boyfriend, a vicious bullying journalist. Although the play was written in 1973, men can be just as vicious and bullying 35 years on, yet somehow he comes across as anachronistic. He is like a seventies sitcom character who has stepped from the telly and into the modern world. James Bolam played the role originally and Marshall seems to be his natural heir. Worse still, is that his character is the comedy foil. This sets up a certain amount of shock when he turns, but for much of the play sympathies lie with him, rather than the hard-nosed Anne.

Laurence Fox’s Patrick is so wet as to drip beyond any sense that he is a real character. Again, there is no reason to sympathise with this blanket, there is no reason why Ann should have ended up with him, and there is a feeling it’s her own fault that she has.

Treats is a liturgy of misplaced sympathies, rigid characterisations with an anachronistic undercurrent.