Theatre review: The Starry Messenger

Sam Yates’ production is the first time The Starry Messenger has been staged in London, but it’s not my first encounter with Kenneth Lonergan’s 2009 play: Seven years ago the Royal Court invited four of its playwrights to direct rehearsed readings of plays they found influential, and this was Nick Payne’s choice. At the time I found it enjoyable, if long, but while there’s still a lot to like, seeing it fully-staged does open a lot of questions about the play; plus it’s even longer. The lead role of Mark was written for Matthew Broderick, who makes his West End debut to reprise the role of a generally good-natured but dull astronomer who’s always dreamed of working on exploratory projects but has actually ended up making a living teaching at a community college, as well as the occasional evening class at New York’s Hayden Planetarium. The play is set in the last months of 1996, leading up to the planetarium being demolished to make way for a new science centre, and Mark is feeling as defunct as the building.

Meanwhile Angela (Rosalind Eleazar) is a Puerto Rican single mother and trainee nurse, juggling a full-time day job with night shifts on a cancer ward, and struggling to fit in time to see her nine-year-old son.

She does manage to find time to enquire at the planetarium about kids’ astronomy classes for her space-obsessed son, where she meets Mark and the two start an affair. Which is where the most notable problem that’s apparent in a full production where it wasn’t in a rehearsed reading comes in (the different casting choices also inevitably contributing,) namely the age difference. Beautifully written it may be, but The Starry Messenger does on one level boil down to a midlife crisis fantasy cliché of an attractive 31-year-old woman having an affair with an unremarkable man decades older than her. Despite the fact that it doesn’t come completely out of the blue, the audience tonight did gasp uncomfortably when the pair kissed.

In fact Lonergan comes off badly in general here as far as his attitude to women is concerned: Mark’s wife Anne is a cypher (admittedly she’s being played by Elizabeth McGovern but even so.) Sinéad Matthews’ Doris is the daughter of a patient of Angela’s whose grief turns to vitriol, and Jenny Galloway’s Mrs Pysner is a flat-earther student of Mark’s. On the other hand there’s no denying Lonergan’s dialogue is beautifully written. There’s definitely a boldness to centring a story entirely around a rather dull man without making the story itself dull, and Broderick, who’s got as many Tony awards on his mantelpiece as he has deaths on his conscience, manages to drone his way through three hours while maintaining a kind of wry edge that brings out the dry humour in his character.

The play’s major subplot sees Angela care for cancer patient Norman (Jim Norton,) which in a further irritation she does before her shift, out of the kindness of her own heart – there’s no need for this detail, she would have come off perfectly well if we saw her being an attentive nurse as part of her job, and doing it in her already-non-existent personal time is just bumping her up to a level of saintliness that makes it even more of a stretch that she’d fall for the mediocre Mark. In a play whose whole storytelling style is so meandering there’s little point wondering what this story really contributes, other than building up to Norman delivering a brutal takedown of a priest whose twisted interpretation of Christianity has mentally scarred Angela. And this is Bishop Brennan talking so you know that priest is fucked if he ever catches up with him.

The writer also uses a very abrupt plot twist whose complete lack of context I can most charitably put down to using April De Angelis’ gun (it’s like Chekhov’s gun if Chekhov forgot to do the set-up.) Where this production is concerned it’s also frustrating to see the actual leading lady demoted in the bows, and knocked off the posters and the publicity photos (I had to Google quite a lot to even find any featuring Eleazar) below McGovern in a minor role (hard to believe, but English is actually Elizabeth McGovern’s first language.) But the scenes of Mark trying to teach Mrs Pysner and Ian (Sid Sagar,) who’s convinced he’ll want to hear some extremely detailed and scathing critiques of his teaching methods, provide effective comic relief. Essentially The Starry Messenger is a hard one to pin down: It’s too long, with Yates’ production feeling downright soporific at times, but it mostly holds the attention. And it is rewarding in many ways, but the leisurely pace allows a bit too much time for the mind to wander over the ways in which the play is problematic.

The Starry Messenger by Kenneth Lonergan is booking until the 10th of August at Wyndhams Theatre.

Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.