The Outside Dog and The Hand of God review – chintz and terror from Alan Bennett
This pair of monologues from Alan Bennett’s 1998 Talking Heads series contain an odd and irreconcilable tension between past and present. Both were filmed earlier this summer for the small screen, and the same actors and directors now reunite at the Bridge theatre in London. The Hand of God, starring Kristin Scott Thomas, is vintage Bennett played straight up. But the first, sensational monologue of this double bill, The Outside Dog, is reformed, modern Bennett, with noirish bells on – and it is a masterclass in making the old new.
Rochenda Sandall, in the latter, plays Marjory, a woman with an obsessive compulsive disorder and a psychopathic slaughterman for a husband. Sandall’s hair-raising performance, along with Nadia Fall’s extraordinary direction, makes for a breathtakingly bold and theatrical piece that sucks away every ounce of tweeness and drags the story into 2020.
Sandall is a tour de force of fearful vulnerability and hard-faced defensiveness. Originally performed with more coyness and humour by Julie Walters, this is a frightening and physical enactment that speaks to our times: news stories have highlighted the rise of domestic violence during lockdown, and here Sandall shows us its noxious complexities.
Marjory is terrified victim and silent accomplice, aware of her husband’s guilt but immobilised by fear and abuse. The contemporary edge to Gareth Fry’s sound design and Jon Clark’s lighting – alternately moody and glaring – makes it look even more contemporary. Like an exquisitely formed short story, it distils an entire world into 30 minutes. We are left wanting more.
The Hand of God is its opposite: a charming, faithful rendition of the original play, directed by Jonathan Kent, that Bennett purists will no doubt lap up. It is nostalgic, chintzy and revels in tweeness – even the back-screen video projections by Luke Halls are sepia-tinted.
Scott Thomas’s Celia, a genteel dowager from the home counties, runs an antique shop and is a flatter character. Where Sandall’s Marjory is full of grit and dark intensity, Celia is lost in the past, refusing to buy a TV set and sneering at modern-day bargain hunters. Scott Thomas performs the part smoothly, much like her TV performance.
Celia is gently satirised for her avariciousness and snobbery: she reckons she has a nose for a bargain but is proved wrong in the punchline of this piece. Although this twist is satisfying enough, the satisfaction comes at her expense – she is undone by her own hubris and we are laughing at her without caring for her enough, as we more often do with Bennett’s lonely, wanting women.
The difference between these monologues, when performed side by side, gives a bristling discordancy to the night. It is Sandall’s performance that lingers, discomfitingly. Live indoor theatre is whirring into motion again and there should be praise for every show that gets up and running, in the circumstances. But, if you want to be reminded of the best of theatre, it lies in the first, scintillating half-hour here.
