THEATRE REVIEW

MARCH 2024 | Volume 237

 

An Intervention is a sensationally fascinating two-hander with an incisively funny, clever and sometimes intense script by British playwright Mike Bartlett and compelling performances by Kate Craven and Christiaan Westerveld.

Craven and Westerveld play unnamed good friends—let’s call them She/Her and He/Him. They disagree at one point as to whether they are best friends (the play is essentially a series of disagreements), but they are certainly close and can confide frankly in one another—at least at the start.

The first of the play’s interventions concerns a conflict in the Middle East (the play was written before the current Israeli-Palestinian war) in which the British have decided to intervene by sending troops. He supports the intervention; she has been protesting against it.

The second involves her drinking. He is concerned that it’s excessive, that she may in fact be an alcoholic, and he attempts to intervene by imploring her to cut down or stop or get help. She denies that it’s a problem and resents that intervention of his as much as she does his support of the military one.

The third occurs after a triangle develops among the two friends and an offstage woman, Hannah, whom he first befriends and with whom he gradually becomes closer and closer. Hannah is very critical of her, and she thinks very little of Hannah. Eventually, she attempts to intervene in the relationship between him and Hannah, which doesn’t go over well either.  

For most of the play she needs him more than he needs her. She does drink a lot, is passionate about everything, and appears to have no one but him to lean on. His support for the war breaks her heart, and her jealousy of Hannah compounds the political argument. She has probably 2/3 of the dialogue, and in Kate Craven’s remarkable performance she often attacks him with a barrage of words in a nuanced Cockney accent that partially masks her keen intelligence. I saw the show the day of the Oscars and kept thinking to myself, “Best Actress: Kate Craven!”

Westerveld is very good, too, very naturalistic. He works hard at maintaining a relationship with her while drifting into Hannah’s orbit, a dualism hard to sustain. Until the end he doesn’t have the same stakes as her in maintaining their relationship, and doesn’t seem to mourn, as she does, its slow demise.

Director Aaron Craven does an excellent job of keeping the action flowing right through the five or six quick scene changes on David Roberts’ simple set: a small table and two chairs, and a three-sided revolving backdrop that the actors themselves turn.

Bartlett’s script is really smart, dramatizing a friendship between a man and woman that is not in any way sexual but is affected by changes in both the foreign and domestic environments. Only at the end did the play go awry for me, an extended black comic visual metaphor reaching back into theatre of the absurd. It changes the tone of the play too radically for my taste, and shifts the focus away from the detailed push and pull of anintimate friendship that An Intervention so effectively dramatizes otherwise.

 

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