At one point in Adam Rapp’s dense and intense piece of storytelling theatre, Bella Baird, a Yale professor of creative writing, argues that reading a novel is akin to adultery. She calls it a joint act of imagination; the writer inventing a world, the reader immersing themselves in it, the two complicit in a private communion.
The idea resonates because Baird has surrendered herself to fiction with a near sexual dedication. Single and unpropertied, she spends her time hoping to enthuse students about the murderous actions of Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and trying not to dwell on the 17 years that have elapsed since publication of her modestly received YA social science-fiction novel, Billy Baird Runs Through a Wall. Her real sex life is confined to the odd one-night stand every couple of years.
One reason she is drawn to her student Christopher Dunn is he has the same detached attitude to flesh-and-blood people and a similar tendency to live his life through literature. The erotic charge that flickers between them transcends age: it is a passion of the intellect. They scarcely even touch.
That explains why Dunn’s commitment to autofiction takes him beyond norms of acceptable behaviour. He is inspired not just by the elegance of Dostoevsky’s prose – “Some day I’m going to write a moment like that” – but by Raskolnikov’s experiment in murder, a transgression in search of a higher purpose.
Rapp’s story about stories occupies an internal world of its own. With its name-checking of novelists – JD Salinger, Honoré de Balzac, James Salter – and a half-narrative, half-acted script, it is slow to reveal itself. It is like watching a metaphysical version of David Mamet’s Oleanna in which the rules of engagement have been set on some esoteric plane.
And yet in Matt Wilkinson’s austere, firm-footed production for Cusack Projects and Half Moon Street, lit with cool restraint by Elliot Griggs on a near empty set by James Turner, Madeleine Potter is never less than compelling as Bella, weaving tales of bereavement, illness and ambition with sonorous assurance. As her foil, Eric Sirakian is suitably enigmatic, a man-child who takes heady wish-fulfilment to its bodily limit.
At the Traverse, Edinburgh, until 25 August
