Missing in action: meet the invisible stars of contemporary drama

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/apr/08/missing-in-action-contemporary-drama-unseen-stars

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With revivals of Mary Chase’s American comedy Harvey and Kevin Elyot’s My Night With Reg currently playing in the West End of London, theatregoers are able to construct an unusual double-bill – because both belong to the small number of dramas that have a title character who never appears on stage. The imaginary friend of Elwood P Dowd, the 6ft-tall white rabbit Harvey is perhaps 20th-century drama’s most famous invisible title character – apart from the man who repeatedly fails to keep his appointment with two tramps in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. (Although another contender for the best-known-unseen-character trophy is the teenager name-checked in the title of Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party.)

If, in the 19th and early 20th centuries a character’s name on the poster guaranteed he or she would enjoy a reasonable time on stage – Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler – more recent naming practices reflect contemporary drama’s greater interest in irony and misdirection. A new play called Three Sisters now would probably contain only the characters’ brothers or a single sibling mourning two who had died before the action.

There are differing explanations for theatre’s principal missing characters. Godot is almost certainly a reassuring illusion created by Vladimir and Estragon to give meaning to their tedious lives, while the unseen lead in My Night with Reg has been an all-too physical presence before the action: during the play it is gradually revealed that before his death from Aids, Reg has slept with all but one of the six characters we meet and several whom we don’t, including the vicar who officiates at Reg’s funeral.

The hostess invoked in Abigail’s Party is also undoubtedly around. Although it is a common confusion – useful for quiz-setters – that Abigail is the name of the socially ambitious hostess played by Alison Steadman in the stage premiere and TV version of Leigh’s play, that is, in fact, Beverly. Abigail, the 15-year-old daughter of one of Bev’s dinner guests, is holding her own teenage soiree next door.

Among these theatrical absconders, Elwood P Dowd’s rabbit has a complex dramatic status. Unlike Reg, Godot or Abigail, the spectral pet is given stage directions: “ELWOOD nudges HARVEY vigorously, and apparently HARVEY nudges him still more vigorously, for ELWOOD is knocked out of his chair on to the floor,” for example. So the actor playing Dowd – James Dreyfus, in the current revival – always has an opaque co-star.

Later in the play, another character reports a sighting of the bunny, and there is a subsequent suggestion that Harvey may, at some level, exist. Dowd describes him as a “pooka”, which his psychiatrist discovers is “from Celtic mythology. A fairy spirit in animal form. Always very large.” Alone among the main dramatic phantasms, the rabbit is witnessed by the audience: Dowd unveils an oil painting he has commissioned of his dazzling whiskered friend standing with a massive paw around his shoulder.

Harvey was first performed on Broadway in 1944 and much of its humour has dated – although the romantic speculation of Elwood’s relatives that he might be “seeing someone” remains a good gag. However, there is still something radical about the play’s employment of a participant in the action whom neither those on stage nor the audience can see. (In most plays featuring ghosts, from Hamlet to Blithe Spirit, the vision is embodied by an actor, who can be seen by at least one person.)

Whereas Harvey is on stage but we can’t see him, the others – Godot, Reg, Abigail – take advantage of one of the simplest but most powerful theatrical devices: the manner in which verbal references can make an offstage character extraordinarily real (or, in the case of Vladimir and Estragon’s theoretical saviour, unreal) to an audience. From only a few lines, viewers of My Night With Reg build up a vivid picture of his lovemaking and his personality (“Reg” is an Anglicised nickname for an American called Rinaldo). We also develop a clear sense of another person who is only briefly mentioned: Brad, a phone-sex addict who likes one of the actual characters to address him as if he is a dog.

In this way, theatrical dialogue plays with the tendency of imagination to be visual: in conversation, we will begin to build up an impression of unseen individuals from brief anecdotal details. Sometimes, we can be misled, when a “partner” turns out to be different gender or race from the one we have assumed – a trick that playwrights also employ.

Two of the dramatists most adept at conjuring people who are out of sight but very clear in our mind are Alan Ayckbourn and Simon Gray. Ayckbourn, an obsessive explorer of stage space and time, has frequently probed the paradox that theatregoers can see what they don’t get. His children’s play Invisible Friends (1989), inverts the Harvey tactic by having a protagonist whose invisible childhood friend suddenly turns up at her house, and is performed throughout with people the audience can see but the characters can’t, and vice versa. In Absent Friends (1974), meanwhile, all the conversations are overshadowed by Carol, the recently drowned fiancee of a man who has just reunited with a group of acquaintances. Private Fears in Public Places (2004) economically uses knocking from off-stage to establish vividly the presence of a cantankerous old man demanding the attention of his carer.

The modern play most populous with absentees, though, is surely Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms (1981), which has a cast of seven – the staff of a foreign-language school in Cambridge in the early 1960s – but at least as many unseen significant others, including Susan Windscape, the mentally unwell teenage daughter of one teacher and Thomas Cull, the lover of the school principal. Both lives are elaborately detailed, as are those of the elderly mother, philandering husband and wife and children of others. Even the otherwise isolated central character, St John Quatermaine, receives occasional postcards from Ferdinand Boller, a Swiss student. Gray deliberately never explains this correspondence, leaving the audience, as so often with offstage characters, to provide their own storyline.

At least three (and possibly more) of Gray’s ghostly presences die during the action of that play and we feel sad that they have gone, even though they were never there. It is further evidence that, although Harvey is the most eye-catching example, the absent protagonist can be an impressive rabbit for dramatists to pull out of their hats.

• Harvey is at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 2 May; My Night With Reg is at the Apollo, London, until 11 April.