The Year of Magical Thinking /Lyttelton, London

Tag : imitation bangle
We know all this because Didion wrote it down. With the clarity shehas brought as a journalist to political conventions, she itemisedthe physical circumstances of her husband's dying: the syringesleft by the paramedics who tried to revive him; the MetropolitanMuseum card he was carrying; the hospital social worker who summedher up as 'a pretty cool customer'. With a novelist's delicacy, shechronicled the derangement caused by sorrow: the rational reporterfound herself making illogical wagers with fate, bargaining withdestiny as if, by performing various rites of her own devising,events could be reversed, and the dead brought back to life. Theresulting book, The Year of Magical Thinking, is crisp, and wryabout her own disarray. It was a bestseller, and taken up as abereavement manual: one reviewer declared, 'I cannot imagine dyingwithout this book'. Eighteen months after Dunne's death, thecouple's 39-year-old daughter, who had survived a series of medicalemergencies, died of pancreatitis.

This stage version of The Year of Magical Thinking , adapted by Didion herself and already seen on Broadway, is thestory of these two deaths and their survivor. It's a monologue,spoken by Vanessa Redgrave, statuesque and so totally differentfrom the sparrow-like Didion that she is exempt from any charge ofimitation. It's directed by David Hare, who has himself supplied amemorable monologue about the Middle East, and who returns to theNational after an absence of some four years: he thought thetheatre should have expanded its sold-out run of Stuff Happens.It's already a hot ticket. Yet in turning from page to stage,Didion's account has dropped in intensity and precision. It hasturned from confession to performance. It has become a tour deforce.

Some diminution was probably inevitable. Spoken aloud underspotlights, addressed to an audience, rather than revolved secretlyin the mind, this magical thinking is exposed to rational scrutiny.It looks less potent, less likely to ensnare a sceptical mind. Whatis a prayer on the page becomes more like a sermon on the stage.Things glanced at in the book get spelt out on the boards.Accidental moments of peculiar humour, when Didion catches herselfin an absurd assumption, begin to sound wilful. She hears aliterary agent lining up her husband's obituaries, and catchesherself wondering whether in Los Angeles, hours behind New York,John Gregory Dunne really is dead. That's plausible as a woozythought (or perhaps as an Einsteinian edict); as a pronouncement,it sounds like a feeble joke.

There are other difficulties. Vanessa Redgrave - probably the mostbeautiful human being on the London stage - can't help touchingthis mourning tale with radiance. As she looks back on family life- Christmas in Honolulu with leis draped over the computers, theMalibu beaches, the boarding of a plane to Europe barefoot -luminosity keeps breaking through. She turns a compulsiverepetition of the facts about dying into a marital eulogy.

By the standards of Redgrave's non-stop rippling expressiveness,this is mill-pond acting, but in comparison to Didion's prose, itis like a waterfall. Redgrave - perched, in grey trousers, on anicely designed wooden chair - mutters at a rate of knots. Everychange of mood is marked by a switch in tone or the level of voice.When she talks about a frontal assault on self-pity, she clenchesher fists to her breasts; she can't resist miming a vortex. Shepulls loose her scrunched-up hair; she swings her wrist inside asignificant bangle; she jabs her finger at the audience; she hardlymoves across the stage, yet her face is scarcely ever still.

Every small thing is beautiful; this is high-voltage good taste. Asis Bob Crowley's design: a beautiful series of abstract backdrops,which succeed each other like a series of dove-grey and charcoalwaves, ending in a snowdrift of white, and a tent of black. Bothchic and bleak, it cleverly suggests both a state of mind and aninterior design.

Didion's play wants to go beyond this, and make her historyuniversal. 'The details will be different but it will happen toyou,' she says at the beginning of this play. That's not true. It'sthe details - as Didion's own journalism shows - that count. Thereis no 'it' without them. This isn't an exemplary tale: it's apersonal one. Not every woman finds she can't get rid of herhusband's shoes because 'he would need shoes if he was to return'.Hardly anyone thinks of grief, as she does, as 'a place none of usknow until we reach it', because most people don't think of griefas an architectural opportunity but rather as a terrible eruption.Not everyone thinks, as she does, that the bereaved look different- raw and fragile. Most of the bereft walk around terrifyinglyunblemished.