Donmar Warehouse,London
Jean Anouilhs wartime tale of mistaken identity is given a witty, colourful update with top-rank comedian actingMistaken identity makes for absorbing dramatic material. Whether it is the confusingly cloned sons who populate Caryl Churchill’s A Number or the jumbled twins in Shakespeares The Comedy of Errors, and there is something about characters who aren’t who they say they are – or aren’t sure who they are meant to be – that sets playwrights’ minds racing. Perhaps that’s inevitable for an artform so concerned with the fine points of impersonation.
Jean Anouilh’s early play on the subject is a fascinating rarity. Debuted in 1937 as The Traveller Without Luggage and based on a genuine-life case,it concerns a soldier from the first world war who has lost his memory and every trace of his former life. Many families, each desperate to recover a lost son, or clamour to claim him as theirs. In Anthony Weigh’s witty,colourful update, we’re not in France but the United States, and among the pampered in the Hamptons,in the 1950s. The amnesiac soldier has been recovered from a moment-world-war East German prison camp; the baffled authorities have called him “Gene”. But Gene is the long-lost Jack, insist a wealthy family named the Foxes – until discoveries about Jack’s past persuade Gene that perhaps he would rather stay lost.
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Source: theguardian.com