Review: VISIT FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN, Hampstead Theatre

The lights flash on, a writer stumbles into his scantly decorated flat. A woman follows, champagne on her breath, flirtatious glances smuggled between them. It’s late at night and the inevitability of retiring to the bedroom looms. But it is not what it seems.

What if a stranger knew everything about you? Would you be fascinated? Charmed? Repulsed? Christopher Hampton’s neatly knit stage adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s short story has a serrated shiver underneath its enigmatic, and slightly tepid, elusiveness.

The unnamed woman reveals that she has known him almost all her life, he was her girlhood crush that she never grew out of. We learn of her borderline obsessive behaviour, never unable to relinquish her love, or her obsession. Natalie Simpson’s charged performance balances coquettish charm with unsettling threat, her smile hides clenched desperation throbbing to burst. Is her increasingly implausible yarn unspooling into pure fantasy?

Chelsea Walker’s production is less concerned with answers, and more with the psychodrama lingering beneath the surface.  A younger version of the woman marauds around in a ghostly waltz, the memory of her desire made manifest. Their eyes meet on occasion – face to face with a Freudian double. We are in Hampstead after all.

Rosanna Vize’s angular set is doused in Scandinavian chic. Grey walls, and polished wooden flaws. There’s a cold liminality hiding under its skin that only reveals itself the more you stare. There’s little pretence about it’s theatricality either. The morning sun is a stage light descending ominously from the rafters.

Only in the final moments does it tie its symbolic strings together. It’s heavily implied that the writer is Zweig himself – there’s a reference to writing a libretto for a famous composer only for it to be cancelled in the face of the rising tide of antisemitism (a reference to Zweig’s real-life collaboration with Richard Strauss). The writer contemplates leaving for South America, another nod to Zweig who would commit suicide in Brazil after fleeing Nazi persecution in Europe.

It’s a subtle moment that quietly underpins everything – “it’s not easy being a Jewish writer at the moment” he solemnly admits. His identity is left lingering in the room unexplained but curiously poignant regardless. 

My hypothesis: this is Zweig’s lament for the fading world of yesterday. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and the multicultural metropolis that was Vienna with it. War and death looms on the horizon, including Zweig’s own. In that sense it feels like Zweig has penned this as an apology to himself.

In any case it stands out amongst the tide of contemporary plays that, sometimes cloyingly, wear identity politics on their sleeve even if there's a glaring issue that can't be ignored: this will likely fly over the heads of those not clued up with Zweig's biography. 

Visit from an Unknown Woman plays at Hampstead Theatre Until 27 July

Photo Credit: Marc Brenner

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