TWO ROLES: Lynn Redgrave plays her grandmother and herself in her own play, 'Nightingale.' (Joan Marcus)
In Nightingale, Redgrave attempts to pull together a picture of her maternal grandmother, Beatrice Kempson, someone long dead and a person she barely knew. She takes this desire to examine her grandmother’s past (one that Redgrave has mostly created for the play) and uses it as a conduit for a journey into her own turbulent and personal history, such as the ending of her marriage and her diagnosis of breast cancer.
Wanting to connect with her roots, an idea she’s explored in two previous one-woman pieces she created, Redgrave jumps back and forth in time as both herself and Beatrice, offering insights into both women’s journeys, triumphs, and despairs.
The problem is that Redgrave’s own struggles connect much deeper with the audience than the fictional backstory for Beatrice. Redgrave’s asking, “What damage did I do by staying married? What damage could I have done if I had left with them [the children]?” strikes a more realistic note than descriptions of Beatrice trying to understand the first onset of womanhood in her body and her experiences on her first night of married life when she is expected to perform her “wifely” duties.
Redgrave’s own personality and powerful stage presence works against her here. The more topical and immediate worries about whether she has enough time left as she battles her illness and her regrets about not spending more time with her grandmother (when she was still alive) overpower Beatrice’s talk about a relationship with her own family and her being deathly afraid of growing up a spinster.
While the two characters seemingly exist side by side, Beatrice never really feels as if she has any substance and is more a “what if” memory that fails to take hold. The material itself is quite interesting, but the overall delivery and execution is weak. The idea might have worked much better had another actress played Beatrice, giving a separate voice and physical body to the character.
Another problem is the lack of any real movement on stage (due to a medical condition, Redgrave is reading from the script at a desk), as well as any pictures or projections of Beatrice and the era she grew up in, all of which would help to better set the atmosphere.
Part of the blame must be laid at the feet of director Joseph Hardy. More might have been done to make the entire production come together and flow seamlessly from one section to the next. Even taking Redgrave’s illness into account, technical action or artifacts onstage would have helped set the mood for the play.
The evening’s main strength is in Redgrave herself. From the moment she appears onstage, walking on with a self-assured air, she grabs and holds the audience’s attention, appealing without being overbearing and feeling like an old friend who has a major story to tell. That she has faith in the project is obvious, but she’s perhaps too close to the production to see its flaws.
Still and all, Redgrave makes a valiant effort with the material. One hopes that her next project will be a solo show about her own experiences exclusively, for as Nightingale indicates, that will prove a good deal more fascinating.
Nightingale
Manhattan Theatre Club at New York City Center, Stage I
Address: 131 West 55th Street
Tickets: 212-581-1212 or www.nycitycenter.org
Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes
Closes: December 13
Judd Hollander is the New York correspondent for the London publication The Stage.
