Nightingale

As she has gotten older, Lynn Redgrave seems to have grown somehow more luminous. Sitting at a desk for her one-woman Nightingale, Redgrave glows like a memorial candle, cropped silver hair shining in a lick above her. But this elegiac monologue, a dual portrait of Redgrave and her long-dead grandmother, burns with an unsteady flame. It flickers between true remembrances (quick glimpses of Redgrave’s own unhappy marriage, vanishingly fast references to the recent death of her niece Natasha Richardson) and invented ones. It’s in the inventions that the work gutters and goes out.

A short time ago, unmoored by deaths, near-deaths and divorce, Redgrave sought solace at her maternal grandmother Beatrice’s grave. The stone was blank, sluiced clean by acid rain. Redgrave decided then to invent a past for forgotten Beatrice, stitching together what she knew (an uncle’s death, her mother’s memories) and what she could guess. The actor plays the young Beatrice on her 1909 wedding night, terrifyingly innocent and disgusted by sex. She plays Beatrice in her first flirtation, and later sending chilly notes backstage to the daughter she doesn’t love. Perhaps Redgrave has no responsibility to her relative; she is dead, and Redgrave can make what hay she likes. But though the performer’s voice vibrates with refined command, when she says of Beatrice’s spirit, “Now her hand is in mine,” we cannot believe her. The stories haven’t rung true, either historically or poetically. Poor Beatrice: first, to be forgotten; then to have a story cut for her from whole cloth; and finally to be hung out to dry.—Helen Shaw

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