It's the perennial problem for any dramatist: how to construct a play about a writer and his work without subjecting an audience to a couple of tedious hours of fleeting muses and balled typewriter paper?
Lorenzo DeStefano was at least in with a chance of success with Arthur Crew Inman as his chosen tortured creative one. Inman, an agoraphobic, hypochondriac control freak, wrote 155 volumes of diaries before his suicide in his Boston flat in 1963.
In them, he detailed his strange relationships with his wife, domestic retinue and various young women visitors, as well as his musings on wider social and political issues.
It starts out intriguingly enough in the intimate 55-seater space of the Almeida's never-before-seen Rehearsal Room. Peter Eyre's Inman lies on a bed in the titular dark room to tape and then transcribe his conversations, above all with his long-suffering wife Evelyn (Diana Hardcastle).
"This must be one of the oddest documents ever written by anyone," he says of his work. No one would argue with that, but the line encapsulates the muddle at the play's heart: we have a writer commenting on his magnum opus while simultaneously spouting large chunks of it at a host of characters whose connection to the drama, if not the diaries themselves, can at times seem tenuous. Interest wanes as it all descends into a tawdry domestic melodrama, complete with the appearance of a ghost.
Peter Eyre gives Inman surprising flashes of poignancy in Jonathan Miller's understated (and suitably underlit) production, and is aided by some strong supporting turns, especially from Joanna Page as one of his young companions. But ultimately it's hard to care about any of these characters and even harder to see why anyone would want to subject themselves to the 850,000 words of the edited diaries after seeing this highlights package.
Camera Obscura
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