Writer: Jonathan Spector
Director: Chelsea Walker
The psychology of how we make decisions – starting with an intuitive snap decision, then coming to a more reasoned conclusion a fraction of a second later – is the starting point for Jonathan Spector’s drama about a US-based professor and his wife.
Inspired by the ideas presented in Daniel Kahneman’s non-fiction book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the play kicks off with Esh Alladi’s Lukesh giving us, his students, an amusing slideshow of the concepts behind decision-making. Lukesh is witty, but formally analytical – and takes the same tone in flashbacks with his wife, who has since left him.
Natalya (Natalie Klamar) has left her husband to investigate her family roots in Russia, and her grandmother’s possible connections to Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. Back at the university, Lukesh finds himself mentoring Oscar Adams’s Harold, the son of a notorious white supremacist, who reveals himself to share some of his father’s ideals while protesting that his is a more respectable viewpoint.
As the evening progresses, Spector introduces Alliluyeva herself (Klamar) via a press conference after her defection, and as a younger version of herself who has fallen in love with Brajesh Singh (Alladi), an Indian Communist whom she is forbidden to marry. The relationship Svetlana has with her father (presented only via Duncan McLean’s video designs, played on televisions dotted around the stage) and how that intersected with Natalya’s ancestors is by far the more interesting strand of Spector’s multifaceted work. The critique of a father’s despicable acts and the acknowledgement that his crimes do not absolve those around him tie into Harold’s relationship with his father. We do not need the TV screens morphing from a Soviet despot to a Neo-Nazi to tell us that.
Also in the mix in Spector’s wide-ranging thesis is how to deal with events outside our control, but which still shape us. Fatherhood is one presentation of that. Natalya is also running away from the aftermath of an unavoidable accident, where a cyclist she hit has died. This recurrent theme would be less effective than the father-child relationships, were Harold’s story not hampered by an offstage change of heart. Adams effectively plays the confusion Harold faces when his decision about his relationship with his family’s beliefs has consequences – but such scenes would play better had we witnessed the reason for such a decision.
Blythe Brett’s stage design – an awkwardly long and narrow lecture room – works better as a piece of utilitarian academia than it does when also doubling as railway carriages or dachas of fusty old Russians. It is at its most effective in those opening moments, when it seems as if we have not entered a theatre but a place of learning. As Lukesh tells us, we make a snap decision in that moment about what the play is; only later, do we realise that there is something else at work.
What would help This Much I Know is if that slow realisation solidified around something that felt more closely connected to Lukesh’s lecture material. Like Natalya’s exploration of her family line, the true meaning of Spector’s work is fuzzily open to interpretation, ensuring that we must, as she does, decide what story is important to us. Whether that is a wise course of action for a play to take is debatable – but the open-ended nature of that question robs this work of the potential power it carries within.
Continues until 27 January 2024
