What a difference a production can make! This one's terrific: lively, energetic, never a dull moment and truly ingenious. Emma Bovary’s past leaps out at her, and us, through very cupboard, every drawer, every fireplace of the small, elegant room in mid Victorian rural France. The audience is rapt and still, not a cough, not a fidget: then it laughs and relaxes and nudges its neighbour and then its all attention again, fearful of missing a word, back in this wholly convincing world of long ago where Emma lives and loves and spends too much, and in her desperation invites disaster in. And as Emma leaves the breakfast table and the stage, and the play ends, there’s that rare long pause which theatre people love and work for, the long moment before the applause starts–while the audience pulls itself together and remembers there’s another world out there.
This Rosemary Theatre production gives us a timeless Madame Bovary, as true to life now as she was then. Trapped by custom and circumstance, bowed down by obligation, gambling with fate, yearning for love yet meeting betrayal – this is most of us as we try to make something out of our lives. Flawed, yes – faithless, foolish, spendthrift - yet so vividly alive. Her husband loves her – can she love him? Of course not. Not perhaps the answers the A level Madame Bovary syllabus hopes for, but true enough in real life.
The cast in this production don’t so much ‘support’ as are part of the whole, creating a unity which drives the action along. There’s a startling physical energy here, which in her very stillness, her manipulation of events, Emma herself seems to have managed to create. Her past manifests itself out of nowhere to confront her; the slimy shop-keeper, the old crow of a grave-digger, the maid who, perforce, is as much family as servant – and of course the lovers, all temporary passion and lust – the universal inconstant man. And Charles, poor Charles, obliged at last to face the truth.
There but for grace of God go we all, Emma Bovary's to a woman. The whole thing’s magic. Did I write this? I must be a genius. That’s what a really good production of a play makes you feel. Another illusion of course, but that’s what theatre is about. Now back to real life.
