Theatre in Review: Skylight (Golden Theatre)

	Carey Mulligan and Bill Nighy. Photo: John Haynes

It's remarkable how much casting can affect a play: When David Hare's Skylight opened on Broadway nearly 20 years ago, was it this funny, this pointed, this exacting in its analysis of the breakup of a love affair -- and, by extension, of a social order? Memory is a treacherous thing, but I'm inclined to say no.

This is nothing against Michael Gambon and Lia Williams, who, under Richard Eyre's direction, gave sterling performances in that production, but for one thing: It was a little difficult to believe that they had once been passionate lovers. The conflicts were there, vividly illustrated, but they seemed to be largely cerebral. The first time around, Skylight was a discussion play -- a stimulating one, to be sure, and one filled with a strong sense of regret -- but with its deeper fires largely banked. The show taking place at the Golden right now seems to me to be of a different order altogether -- a battle is joined and it involves hearts and minds and the flesh.

Skylight is set in the early '90s and is, in many ways, Hare's comment on Margaret Thatcher's legacy, her philosophy of individual achievement above all, leaving, in his view, the country cleft into opposing camps of haves and have-nots. Kyra Hollis and Tom Sergeant once were lovers but those days are long past. Tom owned a chic Italian restaurant in Chelsea, and Kyra, who worked there, was gradually drawn into his life. When Tom's wife, Alice, discovered the affair, Kyra bolted, never looking back. Several years later, Tom has gone corporate, presiding over a chain of such eateries; Kyra is a schoolteacher in a poor London suburb, living in a dreary sublet council flat. Alice has died of cancer, and Tom has come looking for Kyra; his Mercedes, with driver, is parked outside the flat, he has brought a good bottle of scotch, and he intends to take her out to dinner -- and win her back.

Hare has generously apportioned each act of Skylight to one of his two leading characters. The first act is all about Tom -- itchy, edgy, wisecracking, and sure of his charm (and money), and yet, for all that, unable to stop himself from slipping into a dark and terrible place. In his last Broadway appearance, in Hare's The Vertical Hour, Bill Nighy seemed too twitchy, too overloaded with mannerisms. Here, under Stephen Daldry's assured direction, the actor has smoothed the edges of these nervous gestures and applied them powerfully to reveal a character who has become harrowingly distorted by a grief he cannot fully express or resolve.

Pacing the stage, assuming stances that turn his body into a series of obtuse angles, growling out his dissatisfaction with nearly everything, Nighy makes something oddly charming out of Tom's most curmudgeonly digressions. Fulminating over his adolescent son, Edward, he says, "I saw that old film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. You know, where they look the same. They look like humans, but it turns out they're creatures from Mars. They're pods. Well, another way of putting it, they're male adolescents. It's like they get taken over. Someone comes and surgically removes all the good qualities they have and turns them into selfish hoodlums." Describing his ever-expanding business, he preens a little: "Oh, expand, inevitably. I mean, expand, I hardly need say that. Defend market share. Build another stainless steel restaurant, this one larger, more fashionable than ever, turning over hundreds of covers in a day. It need never end."

But we soon learn that such activity is fueled by guilt and loss, combined with rage that he should be made to feel such things. He unsparingly describes Alice's last days, expiring in a room he built especially for her, as she gradually faded away, leaving things between them unresolved. In some ways, the marriage had long been over, but he cannot bear her loss -- or her apparent forgiveness for his affair. One of the most telling things about Nighy's performance is how quickly one of his comic rants will slide into a pause filled with emotion; Tom is never more than a heartbeat away from tears.

The last time Carey Mulligan appeared on Broadway, in a revival of The Seagull, she seemed very young and just a little bit out of her depth. Seven years later, she has matured into a stunningly assured actress and here makes a formidable counterpoint to Nighy's comic attack. Kyra is one of several female Hare characters who radiate a spirituality that this most secular of playwrights cannot fully explain, and the danger is that she will come off as something of a cardboard saint. There's no worry of that here; Mulligan grounds everything she says and does in hard, cold everyday reality; not for nothing does she spend much of the first act making spaghetti Bolognese. After intermission, having gone to bed with Tom, she makes a lucid, almost incontrovertible, case for why they cannot be together again. She recalls her life with Tom (and Alice, for she became part of the family) -- how, perhaps because she was young and inexperienced, she believed that her love for Tom and her closeness to Alice could exist without conflict. And lest we think her current life is merely a do-gooder's vow of poverty, she describes her work in thunderingly unsentimental terms.

"I'm not a soft liberal," she says. "Far from it. My views have got tougher. They've had to. You grow up pretty fast. Education has to be a mixture of haven and challenge. Reassurance, of course. Stability. But also incentive....Tom, these are kids from very tough backgrounds. At the very least you offer them support. You care for them. You offer them security. You give them an environment where they feel they can grow. But also you make bloody sure you challenge them. You make sure they realize learning is hard. Because if you don't ... if you only make the safe haven ... if it's all clap-happy and 'everything the kids do is great' ... then what are you creating? Emotional toffees who've actually learnt nothing, but who then have to go back and face the real world."

Thus, two people, once lovers, now inhabiting different, diametrically opposed Englands. One life spent amassing wealth and position, yet ending up in an emotional dead end. Another life lived far closer to the ground, but grounded in the satisfaction of trying to make a difference in the world. But because Hare has always had the Shavian impulse to hand out equally good arguments to everyone, the wounding debate that follows forces both to face several nagging questions: Is Kyra, in her new life, merely hiding out from Tom? Is she punishing herself for betraying Alice? Is she running from emotional commitment? Is Tom capable of accepting Kyra as she is, or is he merely seeking solace for his betrayal of Alice? Is there any world in which they can coexist?

Kyra's world is vividly realized in Bob Crowley's set design, which places her abode against a towering backdrop of dreary council flat exteriors, with their outside hallways and dim, fluorescent lighting. It's not really clear to me why the room's upstage walls keep rolling in and out; it may be the production's sole unnecessary touch. Still, it's a powerful visual statement, and Crowley dresses the characters aptly. Natasha Katz's lighting nicely contrasts the warmer, tungsten-based atmosphere of Kyra's place with the cold winter evening-into-morning look outside. Paul Arditti's sound design provides seamless amplification for Paul Englishby's melancholy incidental music and also contributes a variety of ambient street noises that give a sense of the crowded world outside Kyra's door.

Everything else about Daldry's production contributes to illuminating the terrible impasse that these two deeply loving people cannot get past. (Special mention must be made of Matthew Beard, who, as Tom's son, Edward, makes appearances that bookend the play; Edward's nervous, sarcastic behavior is full of gestures drawn from Nighy's performance; clearly, he is his father's son.) Skylight is one of Hare's finest works, an intimate drama that succeeds also as a state-of-the-nation play. The final image, in which two of the characters sit down to a fancy catered hotel breakfast in Kyra's shabby kitchen, is indelible; it represents a merger of sensibilities that eludes Hare's troubled souls. -- David Barbour