Longing to Connect, But Out of Reach
By BEN BRANTLEY
IT'S only an old sock, after all: a stiff, shabby sock in which a key is put before it's thrown out the window to callers at a run-down apartment building in northwest London. But in the remarkable hands of Michael Gambon and Lia Williams -- the stars of David Hare's absolutely splendid ''Skylight,'' which opened last night at the Royale Theater -- that sock acquires, with a few casual-seeming gestures, as many shades of meaning as Desdemona's handkerchief.
As the edgy, eternally restless businessman Tom Sergeant, Mr. Gambon arrives at the flat of Kyra Hollis (Ms. Williams), his former mistress, with sock in hand and a whole wardrobe of fear and longing he doesn't quite know what to do with.
IT'S only an old sock, after all: a stiff, shabby sock in which a key is put before it's thrown out the window to callers at a run-down apartment building in northwest London. But in the remarkable hands of Michael Gambon and Lia Williams -- the stars of David Hare's absolutely splendid ''Skylight,'' which opened last night at the Royale Theater -- that sock acquires, with a few casual-seeming gestures, as many shades of meaning as Desdemona's handkerchief.
As the edgy, eternally restless businessman Tom Sergeant, Mr. Gambon arrives at the flat of Kyra Hollis (Ms. Williams), his former mistress, with sock in hand and a whole wardrobe of fear and longing he doesn't quite know what to do with.
So he twirls the sock, like an old-time music hall performer, in a flashy, awkward invitation to reopen a dialogue that shut down into silence three years earlier. It is obvious that the first and last thing these people want to do is touch each other. Instead, Tom playfully brushes the sock against Kyra's neck. She grabs at it; he tugs at one end; she reluctantly tugs back. Then they give up the game.
The pause that follows resounds with their unspoken question: where on earth do we go from here?
Neither Mr. Hare, the author of such incendiary plays as ''Plenty'' and ''A Map of the World,'' nor Mr. Gambon, the great English actor, is averse to grand gestures. And ''Skylight,'' a Royal National Theater production that arrives from London with its two original stars, definitely has its share of those: passionate statements of belief, full-voiced cries of pain and the angry, desperate flinging of books and cutlery.
But under the exquisite, carefully calibrated staging by Richard Eyre, the National Theater's departing director, it's the fumbling, aborted gestures that speak loudest and that tear at the heart long after the play is over.
''Skylight'' is the story of an unbridgeable gulf between two people -- an idealistic, inner-city schoolteacher and the upscale restaurateur for whom she once worked -- who, on one level, were made to be together. It is certainly Mr. Hare's most heartfelt statement on an age that seems to thwart all hope of sustained connections, whether between lovers, social classes or Thatcherites and Socialists.
The exasperation this inspires has infused all of Mr. Hare's works. But usually he has begun with a panoramic view of a society or an institution (the church, in last season's ''Racing Demon''), then zoomed in on the individuals within it, often to overly schematic effect.
Here, his starting point is with individuals. And while their story opens windows on the paralyzed, sickly England in which the play is set, Mr. Hare never betrays the complexity of his characters or the currents that both bind and isolate them. The result is more fluidly organic than, and every bit as articulate as, any of his previous works.
It is also, by far, his most emotionally accessible play. Throughout ''Skylight,'' Tom and Kyra are locked in a wrenching dance of desire and frustration, reaching out, shuffling forward and then quickly drawing back, like children fascinated by a fire.
These rhythms are most literally realized in Mr. Gambon's sly, sad footwork. Watch how he tentatively props, and then withdraws, a well-polished shoe on the rung of a chair in which Ms. Williams sits, or his almost balletic scuttle across the stage, as Tom seeks to impress the woman he lost.
But Ms. Williams's more contained Kyra, who is 20 years younger than Tom, finds her own, equally affecting cadences of advance and retreat, of opening into a luminous vulnerability and then slamming the door on it.
This is a couple for whom even the most commonplace subjects are riddled with danger; words catch in their throats like razor blades. When Kyra remarks simply that she likes old movies, adding, ''They have something we don't,'' it is clearly the wrong thing to say. The dialogue onstage has reached another stalemate, and its participants have to start all over again.
The back story of Tom and Kyra is certainly thorny enough to make even casual talk a dangerous proposition. For years, Kyra was Tom's invaluable business associate, a babysitter of his children, a close friend of Tom's wife, Alice, and also Tom's mistress. When Alice discovered the affair, Kyra bolted from the Sergeants' lives.
When she sees Tom again, Alice has been dead of cancer for a year. Kyra's reunion with her former lover is prefaced by a visit from Tom's 18-year-old son (played with winning adolescent woundedness by Christian Camargo), who tells her something of the hell into which his father has since descended. As Tom will later say of his wife's illness and its consequences, in a tone of blistering bewilderment: ''You suffer. That's what you do. There are no short-cuts.''
Death and infidelity, and the guilt they engender, would seem to be enough to take on for one play. But Mr. Hare, being Mr. Hare, offers quite a bit more to consider. Tom and Kyra are, in a sense, variations on political types he has presented before: the dynamic capitalist who defines himself by accumulation (like the soul-devouring press lord in ''Pravda,'' written with Howard Brenton) and the idealist who flees the corruption of the commercial world (as in the heroine of ''The Secret Rapture'').
Not surprisingly, the dialogue in ''Skylight'' can assume Shavian dimensions, embracing everything from practical politics to love as a private and public phenomenon. But though there are belief-defining monologues here of considerable length, they never feel like a playwright's diatribes. Nor does Mr. Hare ever tip the ideological balance: Kyra and Tom are equally adept (and accurate) in pointing out the other's delusions.
Mr. Gambon, best known to American audiences for his portrayal of Dennis Potter's macabre ''Singing Detective'' on television, gives a performance of spectacularly showy energy that reminds us of the exaggerated, blissfully theatrical aspect of other Hare characters (the flamboyantly disaffected heroine of ''Plenty,'' the Rupert Murdoch-like figure in ''Pravda''). Yet he also unerringly locates the quiet, lonely terror behind the flashiness.
Ms. Williams responds to Mr. Gambon with a flame that is none the less impressive for its lower, steadier light. The actors are matched in force of presence and actorly intuition. And you never question for a second why two such dissimilar characters wound up together.
There are very few flaws to pick at. True, Mr. Gambon occasionally seems to be playing more to his theater audience than to Ms. Williams, particularly in the second act. There are a few glib lines that bizarrely bring to mind Terrence Rattigan. And John Gunter's otherwise excellent set doesn't really need the symbolic, wasteland-like cityscape to remind us of the blighted England outside.
Otherwise, theatergoing today doesn't get much better than this. Mr. Hare has written a play that is both devastatingly clear-sighted and compassionate. Mr. Eyre and his company always keep the work's thematic ambitions within the compelling, naturalistic framework of a love affair gone wrong. And the rendering of emotional and physical details is so acute that you may be, at moments, embarrassed by the rawness of the intimacy onstage.
''Skylight'' is hardly optimistic. Insight isn't any more redemptive here than it has ever been in this playwright's works. Nor would it seem that even with the most generous intentions can a person connect fully with anyone else. (Witness the skylight of the title, the centerpiece of the room Tom built for his dying wife, or the lovely concluding scene between Ms. Williams and Mr. Camargo.)
Still, you're unlikely to leave the theater considering suicide or a long session with a Scotch bottle. For all its sense of futility, ''Skylight'' glows with a bewildered but invigorating respect for life as it is. To see that feeling rendered with such emotional eloquence by a team of first-rate artists is in itself a reason to hope.
SKYLIGHT
By David Hare; directed by Richard Eyre; sets and costumes by John Gunter; lighting by Paul Gallo and Michael Lincoln; sound by Freya Edwards; production stage manager, Susie Cordon; technical supervisor, Gene O'Donovan; general management, Stuart Thompson. Presented by Robert Fox, Roger Berlind, Joan Cullman, Scott Rudin, the Shubert Organization and Capital Cities/ABC. At the Royale Theater, 242 West 45th Street, Manhattan.
WITH: Michael Gambon (Tom Sergeant), Lia Williams (Kyra Hollis) and Christian Camargo (Edward Sergeant).
