Theatre review: The Lesson

For a lauded and influential playwright, Eugène Ionesco is so rarely performed in the UK that me catching a second production in 2022 means it must be a bit of a big year for him in London. In Southwark Playhouse's Little space, Icarus Theatre brings The Lesson to life with the creative use of projections that turn captions for the hearing-impaired into the stuff of nightmares. The Pupil (Hazel Caulfield) arrives, excited, at the apartment of the famed Professor (Jerome Ngonadi,) who she hopes will help her prepare for a Doctorate (preferably all the Doctorates.) She already knows three of the four seasons so this should just be a formality. The Professor starts her on arithmetic before moving on to linguistics, despite the warnings of his stern housekeeper Marie (Julie Stark) that this never goes well for him.

The play begins almost as a silent comedy, with Caulfield's giggly Pupil running around the classroom, picking up books and playing records in excitement at all the knowledge she's about to take in. Once the Professor arrives we move onto much more verbal comedy of the absurd, especially once we get to his lecture about how several modern languages are identical, differentiated only by the nationality of the person speaking them.

The comedy gets much darker as the lecture seems to have a physical effect on the Pupil, and the pair reverse their roles: Ngonadi's doddery old Professor straightens up and gets more vibrant and menacing, Caulfield's young and enthusiastic Pupil is wracked by pain and mental distress, curling up into nothing. The violent onslaught of words and numbers is the cornerstone of Max Lewendel's clever production: Christopher Hone's set is a classroom with a normal-sized blackboard, but as the play goes on the blackboard unfolds until the whole stage is a space for the Professor to chalk words and numbers onto; even Isabella Van Braeckel's costumes hide nonsensical sentences that assault the Pupil from all sides.

But the most notable technique is the way captions for the D/deaf and hard of hearing are integrated into evey performance: Ben Glover projects surtitles of all the dialogue onto various surfaces of the set, but these too start to come to life until they overwhelm the room. Ionesco's treatment of the central allegory - of how all kinds of crime and cruelty are committed and often brushed under the carpet in the name of doctrine - is a bit bluntly presented, but the increasingly-dark absurdist comedy is always entertaining (the Pupil can mentally mutliply numbers into the quintillions, but can't get her head around subtraction.) It's a short play that you wouldn't want to be any longer - the increasingly oppressive atmosphere leaves you coming out of the theatre gasping for air - but in that time it's always memorable and entertaining.

The Lesson by Eugène Ionesco in a version by Donald Watson is booking until the 23rd of July at Southwark Playhouse's Little Theatre; then continuing on tour to St Albans, Peterborough, Winchester, Millfield, Norwich, Sale, Hull, Leeds, Torrington, Exeter, Minehead, Oxford, Devises, Milton Keynes, Monmouth, Swindon, Eastbourne, Frome, Guildford, Birnam, Sberdeen, St Andrews, Dumfries, Stranraer, Thurles, Athlone, Castleblayney, Mullingar, Belfast, Enniskillen, Aberystwyth, Richmond, South Shields, Alnwick, Hexham, Barnsley, stamford and Gravesend.

Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes straight through.

Photo credit: Ikin Yum.