BWW Reviews: DOONREAGAN, Jermyn Street Theatre, September 9 2013

At 15, I didn't much care for Ted Hughes' poetry, its rural repetitions forcefed to us urban urchins for English Literature O level. I preferred the four other Modern Poets of the set book, particularly the twinkling-eyed John Betjeman, with his easy rhymes and poems about tennis girls. A few years later, when a copy of The Bell Jar seemed to be on every potential girlfriend's bookshelf, and I was educated in its contents (a price worth paying) I liked him even less. And, the older I get, the easier and easier it is to like him less and less. Not a good set of thoughts to run through a reviewer's mind as I sat in the stalls.

Ann Henning Jocelyn's play will do little to change anyone's view of the brooding Yorkshireman, but it will introduce many to the woman in his life who did not write The Bell Jar, but did take her own life (and, appallingly, that of her four-year-old daughter) by means of gas inhalation - Assia Wevill. Doonreagan is set shortly after Sylvia Plath's death in the brief time, mainly happy, that the couple spent in elective exile in the West of Ireland, free of the judgements of friends and family (and their many enemies), before something as mundane as an expired lease sent them back to England and, ultimately, tragedy.

The play is a series of conversations revealing the tensions between the lovers that eventually drove them apart, but also the love and respect that brought them together. Flora Montgomery's Assia is forthright, funny and fallible, simultaneously insensitive towards those left hurt by Sylvia's suicide (wearing her clothes - really?) and acutely sensitive to their opinions. As Ted Hughes, Daniel Simpson is intense (natch) and as insensitive as Assia, although mainly towards her. He may be sexy, but he's a shit.

The play is curiously incomplete. Ireland is presented (literally) as a set of picture postcards with no real exploration of its impact on two people who had, almost uniquely, fled to Galway rather than away. There's no attempt to locate Ted Hughes' bursts of creativity within the Irish literary heritage nor how that rich tradition would have played on his mind when writing (to say nothing of the rhythms of the locals' speech and the all pervasive music). The dialogue feels wrong at times: would the poet, telling the story of his English teacher's failure to connect with Yorkshire schoolboys really have reached for a metaphor and come up with, "He was met by a sea of blank faces"? Would so committed an Anglophile as Assia have used the American-English word "bullshit" in 1966 (twenty years at least before I heard it used anywhere but in movies)?

At less an hour, the play feels undercooked, flawed by a lack of ambition rather than a surfeit (the usual problem for theatre that doesn't quite work). It needs an Act Two in order to complete Assia's tragedy and explore the themes introduced, but not pursued in "Act One". Of course, a playwright makes their decisions and stands by them, but it's not often that I feel so strongly that just a little more input would have made for so much greater an output.

Doonreagan continues at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 21 September.

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