The Year of Magical Thinking

Published Thursday 1 May 2008 at 17:30 by Jason Best

In December 2003, Joan Didion’s husband of 40 years, novelist John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a massive heart attack, a few days after their daughter, Quintana, had been taken gravely ill.

Eighteen months later, after Didion had completed her memoir of her bereavement, she suffered a second loss when Quintana also died.

A big hit on Broadway last year, Didion’s own stage version of her memoir, extended to cover her daughter’s death, shares the book’s unflinching honesty and keen intelligence, and boasts a mesmerising solo performance by Vanessa Redgrave.

At first, Redgrave does not strike you as an obvious choice for the role - she’s British, tall and confident, while Didion is American, slight and frail. But as soon as she appears on stage, you realise that she perfectly embodies the writer’s outward appearance of patrician self-possession, her almost imperious assurance.

Beneath the surface, however, this ‘cool customer’ of one medic’s description was undergoing a near derangement through grief. Random associations would trigger memories of her previous life that would plunge her into what she called the vortex. Her flights of irrationality, such as keeping her husband’s shoes because he would need them when he came back, she came to term magical thinking.

Commanding the stage for more than 90 minutes, Redgrave captures Didion’s inner and outward states brilliantly, conveying rage and confusion as well as dry wit and luminous intelligence. It’s a spellbinding performance, discretely aided by David Hare’s deft direction, muted sound and lighting effects, and Bob Crowley’s semi-abstract, semi-marine backdrops.

Yet for all its qualities, the show is ultimately less moving than Didion’s book. An intimacy has been lost in the transition from page to stage (not helped, perhaps, by the Lyttelton’s sheer size), and the reader’s silent communing with the author becomes the spectator’s appreciation of performance. We’re always rapt, but never as stirred as we might expect.