The Pendulum

Published Tuesday 10 June 2008 at 10:55 by John Thaxter

In Vienna in 1900, an Arthur Schnitzler drama is drawing the cultural elite, many of them from Jewish families happily assimilated into Austrian society. But Schnitzler himself, having mocked the army’s obsession with its formal codes of honour, is about to be stripped of his commission by the German military aristocracy - a hint of simmering anti-semitism.

Against this background Alexander Fiske-Harrison has written this new and touching four-hander about a fateful marriage between a rising army officer and his beautiful bride, she a successful portrait painter with links to Parisian artistic circles, but who carries a trace of Jewish blood from her grandmother.

The first act is largely concerned with scene-setting, almost literally so in the case of James Clarkson, who supplies a marvellously subtle portrayal of the old family retainer, happy that his young master has made a love match, but increasingly disturbed when tiny rifts appear in the domestic scene.

Fiske-Harrison himself plays the officer with something of the style of a handsome British film idol of the fifties, more concerned with burnishing his career than spending time with his wife. She has the profile of a Shavian ‘new woman’ - amused, talented and independent, given a delightfully detailed performance by Sian Clifford.

Completing the cast, Gareth Kennerley plays an ambitious young doctor, friend of the couple, who acts as a voice of moderation when the husband wrongly suspects his wife of infidelity, while she responds with bitter irony which fuels a tragic split between them.

Most of the dramatic action is in the second half and the play might be improved by earlier, more direct hints of the husband’s insecure personality. But as it stands, Allison Troup-Jensen’s production deserves a further airing, perhaps at the New End in Hampstead.