How did a sewer rat like Romeo come to be at a rich man’s party? What would such a man’s daughter

How did a sewer rat like Romeo come to be at a rich man’s party? What would such a man’s daughter see in a boy like that? And why would a nurse (or nurses) so lacking in warmth and empathy go to the trouble of fixing up a secret wedding? Nothing adds up, with the result that we lurch from scene to scene, caring less and less about who does what and why.Yet the combination of oppressive stage-setting and visceral, sometimes violent choreography throws up some gripping moments. The foreplay is a kind of kick-boxing, and the balcony climax a desperate and prolonged maypole twirl, shoulders and faces jammed together, Juliet’s body flying out like a flag in a gale. This is thrilling.Stronger still is the final scene, in which Romeo nuzzles Juliet’s comatose body like a grieving dog, before lugging her to a chair and flipping her about like a piece of hammered steak. Her own death comes – an inspired stroke this – some time after the music’s final chord has died away, so that the razor’s quiet “schlick” sounds sickeningly casual and prosaic.I might have been moved by this, and I should have been. But I was still puzzling over why, with no need to avoid marrying Paris since there was no Paris, Juliet had feigned death in the first place.There was rather more amusing bafflement to be had at the start of Aletta Collins’s The Wedding, a Bridget Jones-style treatment of the Stravinsky score Les Noces. The first joke was seeing Collins, alone on stage clutching a bunch of roses, a good seven months into the pudding club. Thus restricted in her range of movement (the bump is all her own), Collins wittily makes a little go a long way.

The first minutes of choreography, if you can call it that, turn on a nervous tick: Collins removing imaginary hairs from her smart frock with the kind of obsessiveness that to armchair psychiatrists signals uncertainty and desperation to please, if not full-blown paranoia.Then follows a mad duet with the bouquet, which comically zooms about on invisible wires, or floats serenely beside her like a proud father. When the music sings of drinking, a bottle of vodka obligingly appears from the ceiling, followed by a raft of white goods: the toaster, the microwave, and a fridge-full of canapes, which Collins duly munches her way through.Finally, she appears to have forgotten about the ceremony. The message is clear: hang the vows, but marriage still requires a dowry and proof of fertility.. ANTHONY CLARE Gore Vidal, in your memoir Palimpsest you say, “I may not have known well any of the characters in this drama, but I was certainly more interested in my view of them than I was in my view of myself”. But I think you are obviously interested in your view of yourself. ANTHONY CLARE Gore Vidal, in your memoir Palimpsest you say, “I may not have known well any of the characters in this drama, but I was certainly more interested in my view of them than I was in my view of myself”.

But I think you are obviously interested in your view of yourself.
GORE VIDAL Anyone who writes a memoir portrays a certain interest, but it’s pretty minimal. It was the people that I had met that I thought were more interesting to analyse.AC One of the most interesting ideas that surfaces from time to time is the one you have of the other half.GV I am fascinated by duality and by twins. My grandmother was a twin and she lost her twin at birth, and she attached herself to Senator Gore, her husband, who was blind from the age of 10 and really needed her She was his eyes So she had her twin and I was brought up by them. And I think there was something about twins that got into me. The idea that one is completed by another person is an attractive notion in youth. I was brought up with a boy in Washington, to whom you are certainly going to allude, called Jimmy Trimble. I was one week older than he was, we were born in the same year and the same month.

We both enlisted and on the 1st March 1945 he was killed and I felt as if half of my life had gone.AC You’re very sceptical, no doubt, of the role that psychoanalysis has played in American life. But you never felt any inclination to build a route of self-exploration of that kind?GV How on earth can a writer, a real writer, need it? What we do all the time we are working is unconscious. There are certain writers for whom there is no dark secret to delve – I have no secrets.AC You describe yourself as a solitary child, not a lonely child.GV Well I certainly didn’t like the company of other children. I liked the company of adults because they were more interesting.AC You write quite a bit about dreams, and dreams that you dream.GV I have what I think of as a birth dream. My mother had a very narrow pelvis and the army surgeon who delivered me made kind of a mess of it So I came out fairly squashed in the process. I have the dream that I’m trying to manoeuvre my way over rocks and there’s nothing viscous about it. And I sort of see a light ahead and I can’t get my head through.