Review: THE LOVERS OF VIORNE, The Theatre Room, May 11 2016

An inquisitive man, mid-thirties, in an accent that seems to wobble between Northern Ireland and Eastern Europe, questions an older man, well-dressed, clinging to a briefcase, ill at ease. We learn that the older man's wife is being held by the authorities, having confessed to the grisly murder of her cousin, a deaf and dumb woman who shared their home. We hear of their relationship with its occasional infidelities on his side, a strange coldness on hers and a lack of empathy (certainly in the wife and a bit in the husband) that might suggest mild Asperger's today, but may not have done fifty years ago.

In the second half of the play, we meet the wife who is also pressed by the inquisitive man, who always stops just short of taking a prurient interest in this asexual menage-a-trois destroyed by the murder. The woman is evasive, but cannot resist exulting in her transgression; she is calm, yet bursts into anger at seemingly minor indiscretions (stew for dinner - really?); she is charming too, but strangely alone apart from her nocturnal assignations with a mysterious Portuguese. She has also never shaken off her teenage love for a policeman - maybe the murder was a cry for his (or any policeman's) attention all these years on?

The Lovers of Viorne (at The Theatre Room until 21 May) is an eerie, unnerving, fascinating insight into the mind of a murderer. Based on a true story, it has echoes of Albert Camus' The Stranger and a little of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books too - very European, very amoral.

To make this "familiar otherness" work, the performances need to be top drawer, as the carefully constructed atmosphere can be punctured by one false move. James Roose-Evans gets exactly that level from his actors. Kevin Trainor, hiding behind a silly moustache and edging forwards and backwards as he pursues his line of questioning, is our voice (no matter how dirty that makes us feel), challenging husband and wife, but never quite getting to the heart of the matter. Martin Turner opens up a little, but never reveals the emotional cost of the loss of wife and family home, which appears to be more of an inconvenience than shattering tragedy. Charlotte Cornwell gives us an old-fashioned acting masterclass in which she reveals as much in what she doesn't say and do as in what she does, the voice at its strongest when quietly conspiratorial rather than on the rare occasions when she shouts.

We're left wondering what goes on behind the closed doors of houses, behind the polite "How do you dos" and the wistful recollections of failed love affairs. Does this potential violence lie in all of us? Perhaps there's nothing so abnormal as that which appears to be so ordinary.

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