January 8, 2003: Hampton, The Talking Cure
National Theatre, Cottlesloe. Directed by Howard Davies. With Ralph Fiennes as Carl Yung; Jodhi May as Sabina Spielrein; and James Hazeldine listed in the program as Freud, but Hazeldine has recently died and a program insert indicates that Dominic Rowan, who plays Otto Gross, is now also playing Freud.
An absorbing play, with some very fine acting in it, about the quarrel between Freud and his early disciple Jung that ended up sending them on such different paths. Hampton gives the Yung role the centrality — and he is played by the star actor Ralph Fiennes (say “Rafe Fines” — or “Ralph,” as my colleague Peter Thomson tells me to say, unless I prefer the more socially snobbish, condescendingly familiar “Rafe”). Fiennes is an intense, concentrated actor who shows us the increasingly unsettled Jung, heading, at the end of the play — as his patient, very understanding wife Emma fears — toward a nervous breakdown. Although Freud hovers noticeably in the background as the controlling superego of the play, Yung is the ego, the center, and his developing love relationship with his present then former patient Sabina Spielrein is the central action of the play. It is a fairly coherent action, overall, but Hampton seems to find himself intermittently interested in the gathering storm clouds of World War II: the tortured Jung has a dream about a flood that begins in the Baltic and inundates all of Europe; it is a flood of blood. Earlier, in the last scene of Act I, we see Sabina befriend a young girl and then summarily be shot dead by a soldier in a Nazi uniform. It strikes us as a flash-forward, ominous in its seeming prediction of what is to come in Act II, but it turns out only to have been a way to end Act I with a bang (literally so).
This is one of various ways of giving an audience foreknowledge, but here it seems gratuitous and distracting. And it reveals a weakness in dramatic structure. The play is too long to be performed without an interval, but it tends toward the episodic and, after the shooting scene that ends Act II, it has a certain feeling of the anti-climactic. Finally, it doesn’t matter, for present purposes, whether Sabina was murdered by the Nazis in 1942. The bulk of the play, as the scene descriptions in the program make clear, covers the period 1904-05 to 1913 and is set mostly in Zürich. And the real focus lies, not in the cataclysm that will occur in 1914 and then again in 1939, but on the tension Carl Jung experiences between his sense of his mission as a physician to the mentally and emotionally ill and his awakening perception of himself as a man with a body and with bodily needs and desires. This tension is never resolved in the play, and one senses Hampton’s belief that it can never be resolved and that it is precisely this that makes Jung human and appealing to us. Fiennes’s performance certainly makes him appealing in this way.
And Jodhi May’s wonderful performance as the hysterica