DAPHNE DU MAURIER'S MY COUSIN RACHEL AT THE ARTS THEATRE
Helen George as the enigmatic Cousin Rachel
No one does Cornwall drama better than Daphne du Maurier. In miniature. If Poldark is the great expansive saga, packed with characters from feisty country girl Demelza and her kin to the hoighty toighty family at the manor, Daphne du M’s world is the compressed psychological torment of men and women trapped in their own anguished obsessions – whilst Cornish breakers crash in the background. Remember Rebecca? It was the writer’s tour de force, filmed several times over and endlessly fascinating. Its narrator is never named. The first lines reverberate through literature ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate.’
Rebecca haunts the book even though she is dead at its start.
My Cousin Rachel is another intrigue right out of the psychosexual du Maurier box and it should make a thrilling play. The brilliant set evokes the isolation of the dramatic scenery. Philip Ashley a young gentleman just informed of his adored guardian’s death in Italy is a clueless sheltered ingénue. Last night Jack Holden was triumphantly successful in the role. If there was any character totally believable it was this confused mourning under developed, heir to the estate suddenly confronted by Cousin Rachel. Bravo Helen George in this virtuoso role as an exotically playful older woman, Italian to boot, only seven months married and now the black clad widow determined to make a mark in the wealthy estate left, not to her but to her husband Ambrose’s ward, Phillip - along with a sheaf of hysterical notes that condemn his wife as a manipulative money-grubbing quasi- murderess.
What is the poor lad to think shut up in the Cornish manor house with his faithful retainers? Not at lot to begin with. Until of course she arrives and he falls for her hook line and sinker. Gradually her vivacity appears to win all hearts and the callow Phillip falls in love with this beautiful stranger.
What lonely 24 year old wouldn’t as she lays on the full force of her charm? But only when doubts begin to creep into his dazzled brain do things start to go terribly wrong. They’re not helped by the arrival of her friend, the charming ‘lawyer’ Guido, Christopher Hollis. He is actually the most amusing – and convincing – of all the cast and his scenes, brilliantly written, lighten the mood but darken the doubts about his client.. Rachel is beguiling or manipulative, charming or cloying but is she genuine?
But what in the book is refracted though Phillip’s feverish mind his doubts spilled on the page, is on- stage realtiy. Without the brilliantly written unreliable narrator there is scant scope for doubt or the nuances that make the tale forever ambiguous. Owing to illness Simon Shepherd’s understudy Andy Hawthorne played Nicholas Kendall an old friend and solicitor to the confused Philip. He did a great job . This faithful ally begins as a Rachel fan and then begins to wonder – yet is this because his daughter (Aruhan Galieva creates her as a cool cynic) is Philip’s childhood sweetheart and the county of Cornwall expected them to marry? Well that and the vast amount of Phillip’s money he discovers Rachel has withdrawn from the bank in only a few weeks of residence..
As we are led along the wild coastal paths from the austere Barton House to Guinivere’s Point on the treacherous tidal island, the lighting and sound do evoke a wonderful and tragic landscape to a story that has you guessing , just as bewildered about the beautiful Rachel as the moment she made her dazzling appearance.
