WALLACE SHAWN TAKES ON HIS OWN AUDIENCE

Some time ago the New York actor and playwright Wallace Shawn went to hear Naomi Klein, author of “No Logo”, give a talk. What struck him most was the audience. “They were like hungry dogs being thrown meat.” He wanted to stand up and say, “Hey, I’m doing a play tomorrow. Why don’t you all come to it? I’ll give you free tickets.”

Had he stood up, his fellow spectators would have instantly recognised the Sicilian criminal Vizzini from “Princess Bride” or the “homunculus” (Diane Keaton’s ex-husband) from “Manhattan”. Or they might have spotted the voice of Rex, the fretful green dinosaur from the “Toy Story” movies.

If they had taken up his offer on the basis of that genial CV, they would have been in for a shock. What’s remarkable about “Aunt Dan and Lemon”, “The Fever” and “The Designated Mourner”—the first two are part of a season of Shawn’s work at the Royal Court in London—is their combative sense of anxiety. Shawn teases away with Socratic guile at the things that underpin the lifestyles of middle-class liberals. The central conflict unfolds between the play and the audience.

The son of William Shawn, the celebrated New Yorker editor, Wallace Shawn says you only have to meet him “for two seconds” to know he is a child of privilege. But he has no sense of entitlement and wonders how anyone else does. It makes his plays uniquely discomfiting. His distrust of theatrical norms and audience preconceptions, for instance, led him to perform “The Fever” in the rooms of friends, then in the rooms of friends of friends.

Clare Higgins will star in “The Fever”, Jane Horrocks in “Aunt Dan and Lemon” and Miranda Richardson and Shawn himself in “Grasses of a Thousand Colours”, his first play for ten years. It will be directed by Andre Gregory, his co-star in the enduringly original film “My Dinner with Andre”.

~ ROBERT BUTLER

Wallace Shawn season Royal Court, London SW1, from April 2nd