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The fact that all three have also received therapy reinforces the play’s theme about clinicians who help to solve other people’s mental-health problems not being able to deal with the emotional issues in their own lives.
The play is set in 1934 in the Hampstead sitting room/study of the divorced Viennese émigré Mrs Klein. Struggling to come to terms with the death of her son Hans in a climbing accident in Hungary, she has asked a colleague to cover for her while she goes to the funeral. Paula, recently escaped from the rising anti-Semitic persecution in Germany, is finding it hard to make a living in London and so passively agrees to do the glorified secretarial work for her intimidating employer.
However, she is interrupted by the arrival of Mrs Klein’s daughter Melitta, resentful of her presence and angry with her mother’s domineering behaviour, who claims Hans has killed himself. After Mrs Klein herself returns unexpectedly, Paula gets caught up in the longstanding conflict between mother and daughter which comes to crisis point in the wake of Hans’s ambivalent death.
Wright highlights the desperate irony that the life of Mrs Klein, a Freudian psychoanalyst who went on to develop her own influential if controversial theories about the treatment of children, should be blighted by the premature death of her son and fractious relations with her daughter. Having acted as therapist to both of them, she seems unable to give them the natural, spontaneous love of a mother but treats them with a similar clinical detachment to that she uses with her other clients.
Psychiatric jargon flies around with all three characters continually analysing their own and each other’s emotions, or lack of them, as they over-rationalize their reactions. In this cerebral hothouse the long dark night of the psyche becomes increasingly claustrophobic but ultimately reaches some kind of catharsis as real feelings are eventually released.
In the Almeida’s intimate space, Thea Sharrock’s direction maintains the intensity throughout so that we feel we have been through a journey with the protagonists. Tim Hatley’s V-shaped design, with its room of bookcases, writing desk and filing cabinet dominated by dark red walls and low ceiling, adds to the sense of claustrophobia.
The acting is superbly subtle, especially Clare Higgins’s Mrs Klein, a tragic figure who initially seems to be in total control as she imposes her personality on the others with measured authority but who comes to realize belatedly the damage she has done to her relationships with her children, as she guiltily grieves the loss of both. Zoë Waites reveals the depth of Melitta’s narcissistic bitterness and frustrated desire for independence, while Nicola Walker’s enigmatic Paula evolves from pawn to player as she graduates from put-upon assistant to surrogate daughter – as no doubt Mrs Klein would be the first to recognize.
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