Adapted for the stage for the first time, The Driver’s Seat is one of renowned novelist Muriel Spark’s most gripping and disturbing books.
At the centre of this taut, darkly comic thriller is Lise, an enigmatic young woman travelling alone to an unnamed European city, and searching for “the one”.
She seems keen to leave a trail, acquiring a brightly coloured outfit and an equally outlandish set of personas in her encounters with a series of extraordinary, bizarre and desperate individuals. But as the subject of her search eludes her, her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic.
All the while, in a police incident room, the hunt is on for a killer.
As the tension builds and the twin narratives intertwine, The Driver’s Seat asks if we are ever truly in control of our own lives.
“What are her thoughts? Who can tell?”
A curiosity rather than a convincing piece of theatre.
Weird, unhinged and psychologically violent, The Driver’s Seat is an astonishing piece of theatre by the National Theatre Of Scotland – and guaranteed to keep you up at night.
The result is not an uplifting evening; its effect is dark, disturbing, thought-provoking.
It does feel by the end that the audience has been led to somewhere deeper: applause was respectful and polite – if somewhat unmoved.
Tautly moulded together by a cerebral understanding on stage, the cast play off one another effortlessly, drifting in and out of scenarios and situations with consummate ease, any minor transgression fundamentally assuaged by the writer’s beautiful and touching words.
Its World Premiere stage adaption of a lonely young woman’s dark and disturbing journey is more than worth getting in to your driver’s seat to catch.
There is strong support here from the likes of Ryan Fletcher, Gabriel Quigley and Michael Thomson, but it is the steely, volatile and self-destructively manipulative presence of Lise as brought to life so devastatingly by Christie that they pivot around in an alluringly elliptical study of self-invention and everyday madness.
Such a stylised and psychologically intense play requires both an excellent lead and a fine ensemble. Sansom has found himself both.
Although this self-conscious theatricality is initially distancing it eventually forces us to confront head-on the unsettling questions Spark’s asks about identity, male violence and the nature of empowerment, embodied in Lise’s attempt to take control of her own death.
For all the show’s pizzazz and polish, it leaves us feeling as empty as Lise herself.
Ultimately, Sansom is too faithful to a text whose interest is its narrative technique. In three-dimensional space and time, the focus on surface becomes unsatisfyingly superficial.
A production more to admire than to like, The Driver’s Seat is mostly worthy, even if it stalls at the final bend.
Theatre Preview: The Driver's Seat
Laurie Sansom on bringing new life to literature
Laurie Sansom--The Driver's Seat
Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh from Saturday June 13, 2015, until Saturday June 27, 2015. More info: www.lyceum.org.uk
Tramway, Glasgow from Thursday July 2, 2015, until Saturday July 4, 2015. More info: www.tramway.org
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