THEATER REVIEW : A Family’s Dark ‘Indiscretions’ in Humorous Light

The current Broadway producers of Jean Cocteau’s “Les Parents Terribles” changed the play’s title to “Indiscretions,” making this dark, unpredictable and madcap farce sound as if it were just another bland boulevard romp or the new Neil Simon. Those producers, however, should be forgiven that and any other crimes they may have committed. The cast and production they’ve delivered to the Ethel Barrymore Theatre is nothing short of a sensation.

When Cocteau’s play about a demented French family first opened in 1938, it was closed down by the Municipal Council of Paris, which apparently did not take kindly to depictions of incest. Times have changed enough so that the play is still disturbing without being really shocking. And dysfunctional, bourgeois families have never been so much fun before, thanks in large part to Jeremy Sams’ witty translation, Stephen Brimson Lewis’ wonderful sets and costumes and the blazingly smart direction of the young British wonder Sean Mathias.

Kathleen Turner is Yvonne, a diabetic hysteric neurasthenic shut-in, and second only to Medea in the bad mothering department. She is, plainly, in love with her grown son Michael, who returns her devotion. These two don’t kiss, they make out.

The trouble is Michael has fallen for a certain young lady named Madeleine. In Yvonne’s logic, which Turner delivers deliciously, this is treason. “I want him arrested!” she insists in her basement-low voice, tromping around in layers of blond curls and lace. Yvonne’s parsimonious view of love makes absolute sense to her. “If you give it to someone, you have to take it away from someone else. That’s the law of nature,” she tells Leo, her not entirely sympathetic sister, on whose money the entire family lives.

As the crisply fashionable Leo, Eileen Atkins seems incapable of an imperfect line reading. Imagine an amalgam of Bette Davis, Coco Chanel and Cruella De Vil and you have Leo, who is precise and devastatingly honest, except when she isn’t. Atkins is hilarious when she levels a glare at her sister and informs her, using a sustained low note, “You’re a very strange woman, Yvonne.”

When Mathias gets these two working off of each other, then “Indiscretions” is a thing of beauty. Incensed by Leo’s lack of sympathy, Yvonne stingingly lectures her sister that she couldn’t possibly understand Yvonne’s love for Michael, never having had a child herself. Leo, who would rather die than show a wound, sits next to Yvonne, containing her ire, folding a hand towel into increasingly tiny pieces with extreme concentration. “That may well be so,” Leo answers in a tight, falsely pleasant voice, “All I know is that in life one must make an extreme effort to keep one’s feelings under control.”

Mathias sustains the pathology of all the family members at once, like the conductor of a wonderful, mad quartet. Roger Rees plays the father George, an absent-minded inventor who deals with his wife’s unholy love for their son with politeness, understanding and adultery. He just happens to be sleeping with his son’s girlfriend, but, well, complication is the stuff of farce, and of life.

*

Although he’s funny, Rees’ eccentricities seem skin deep compared to the female stars, who inhabit their weirdness completely.

As Michael, Jude Law (the only holdover from the original 1994 Royal National Theatre production) at first overdoes the youthful energy and zest. He has the physicality of a satyr or a mime--tight shirt over taut body, boundless energy, fluorescent blond hair that often seems to have its own will, sticking straight up.

Wearing curly red hair as Madeleine, an almost unrecognizable Cynthia Nixon mixes innocence and worldliness in the least flashy role of the piece.

In Madeleine’s digs, an airy, wide-open loft, Lewis provides a winding white staircase that seems to go all the way up to the sky. Mathias uses it brilliantly, as an avenue of escape and entrapment for the characters.

Madeleine’s orderly environment is in stark contrast to Yvonne’s boudoir, where shoes, hatboxes and suitcases can be seen crammed into every corner. The mottled walls and ornate moldings are a ghostly gray-blue, the color of a mausoleum, extending out into the hallways of the family manse.

In its Broadway debut, Cocteau’s play has been revealed by Mathias for what it is: a world-class farce that looks back to Sophocles and Moliere while looking forward to Joe Orton. Now, if only they’d bring it to Los Angeles.

* “Indiscretions (Les Parents Terribles),” Ethel Barrymore Theatre, 243 W. 47th St., New York City, (800) 432-7250.