Two years ago at the Edinburgh Traverse Mike Cullen's play about memories of child abuse had a raw sledge-hammer power. Totally re-directed and re-cast, with film star Catherine McCormack as the interventionist therapist, it now seems both less intellectually loaded and less emotionally exciting: in a curious way, melodramatic exaggeration heightened the focus on the issues.
What we see is a triangular drama in which the balance of sympathy constantly shifts. Anna is a fiercely man-hating hypnotherapist who has clearly become fixated with a particular case: that of the traumatised Lynn, who has recalled and itemised the horrifying sexual abuses inflicted by her father since the age of three. But when Lynn is confronted by her father, David, he turns out to be a stricken figure, now jobless and stigmatised, who strenuously denies the accusations. What we do learn is that he is capable of intemperate violence and that the therapist has transferred many of her own private traumas on to her patient.
Everything about Michael Attenborough's production seems plausibly realistic. Speeches overlap, Francis O'Connor's design of Anna's soon-to-be-abandoned house has a bare-boards accuracy, and McCormack's Anna is much less brutal than the one we saw in Edinburgh. The extreme beliefs are still there - such as the idea that all men simply see women as "a hole to be filled" - but McCormack, in stylish grey sweater and slacks, is an earnest meddler rather than an emotional totalitarian. In a promising stage debut, she even shows a soft-spoken vulnerability that psychologically prepares us for the play's climax.
But in damping down the play's anti-therapist virulence, Attenborough draws attention to its weaknesses. The more realistic the play becomes, the more we question its premises. Would charges issuing from a client who actually lived with her therapist not lose all credibility? And would the vilified father enter the therapist's house without being accompanied by his lawyer? In Edinburgh such points seemed irrelevant because we were watching a visceral metaphor. At the Whitehall they impinge on one's consciousness precisely because the action has a greater surface realism.
Cullen's play still makes the valid point that we have to strike a balance between punishing genuine abuse and refusing to surrender to false, hypnosis-induced memory .The key confrontation between daughter and father also has a disturbing emotional power, largely thanks to fine performances from Shirley Henderson as the clipped and gritty Lynn and Larry Lamb as the ruined, bewildered father. There are moments when one is still shocked by the play's naked candour. But, in its desperate desire to be fair to the manipulative therapist, the production sacrifices much of the cold rage that initially made Cullen's work so exciting.
Until January 23. Box office: 0171-369 1735. A version of this review appeared in some editions yesterday.
