The playwright is acclaimed. The acting is impressive. The staging is spectacular. The plot is tricky.David Hare’s “The Red Barn,” premiering at London’s National Theatre, starts with a powerful winter storm - and it ends nastily.The play, based on “La Main” by writer George Simenon, comes across almost like a detective B movie script: closing black set windows, flashes of light and piped phone conversations.This is not the 1930s, though, but the New-Year dawn of the Richard Nixon presidency. And the story is not one of the many great crime thrillers by the Belgian novelist but a lesser-known first-person work with more subtle psychology – endlessly fascinating through difficult to stage. The Lyttelton Theatre play is done in one single session of two hours without internal. It takes the plot from two lawyers and their wives battling through a blizzard, to the three-way relationship that develops when one of them fails to make it to safety. There are no obvious points to make an interval break, leaving a tension hanging to be resumed in part two. For the most part we have a calm where private pent-up passion is underplayed and more is hinted at than actually seen.Mark Strong has the key role of Donald Dodd, having to make credible a man who has gone from the most brilliant student at Yale to a modest out-of-town attorney. He is repressed, frustrated with life “with the handbrake on,” still living 30 miles from his father. His pent-up frustration comes across just occasionally in one punch of the wall and the near inevitable violence that finally spills out. Also we see his emotion in the wooing of Mona (played with poise by Elizabeth Debicki), the trophy wife of his best friend. Mona is a block of ice, as chilly as her all-white apartment.Donald has to explain, and duly does at length, how he had an epiphany while sheltering in the barn of the title. He realizes that he is trapped with his wife Ingrid (Hope Davis), who never misses a trick and is “a pillar of the community.” Ingrid is coldly matter-of-fact, testing her husband’s fidelity with Mona. We may not warm to any of them much, though that doesn’t take away from the power of the perfect-storm ending.The production is by Robert Icke with a magnificent set design by Bunny Christie, with the stage slickly transforming more than 20 times from Connecticut retreat to Manhattan penthouse and more.While much of the dialogue has the threesome endlessly discussing their past motivations, it results in amusing exchanges. Ingrid says that she married Donald simply because he looked “a man I can live with” and she liked his downbeat sports jacket, which suggested he wasn’t vain. “So you married me because I was badly dressed?” he asks, exasperated. The line draws a laugh but it encapsulates his whole dilemma.
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