The Oyster Problem ★★★★☆
The Oyster Problem is a remarkable pearl of a play: a patchwork of anecdotes and ideas that welcomes us into the private life of Gustave Flaubert and his literary contemporaries.
The Oyster Problem ★★★★
“The cork has been drawn, so the wine must be drunk!”
The Oyster Problem conjures a vision of a literary gathering where oysters and champagne are taken for granted, and famous novelists come and go with casual intimacy.
Jermyn Street Theatre is a small West End theatre with only 70 seats. You have to walk across the stage to reach the bathroom. Here, we are welcomed into the private life of Gustave Flaubert, the French literary realist best known for his novel Madame Bovary, as he hosts illustrious writers and dear friends: Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and George Sand.
The happy drunken scene feels like an impressionist painting: the writers are surrounded by indistinct reflections of themselves, in the blurry mirrors around the stage. They are living a charmed life, with a touch of unreality to it.
But before long, the hideous spectres of debt and ill health have reared their heads. Reality asserts itself. The mirrors are folded away, replaced by a bright window and bookshelves. The oysters are gone. The increasingly dishevelled Flaubert, in a fit of rage against his niece’s frugality, exclaims, “Wine and cheese? What are we, bohemians?!”
Bob Barrett as Flaubert is quick to anger, snappish and unreasonable, but his great capacity for love and for loyalty shines through. He gives full weight to the contradictions in Flaubert’s personality. Flaubert is at times a cynical misanthrope, but suffers from the same idealistic naivety which dooms his protagonist Madame Bovary.
We see a patchwork of conversations between the assembled novelists, some imagined and others lifted from their writings and letters. They debate questions such as: is an obscenity trial typically profitable for the writer? Why are there so many terrible books written by celebrities, and who buys them? Should a true artist be subject to an editor, or should he stand his ground? Should the author be visible in his work?
The playwright, Orlando Figes, is a historian with a curatorial eye for language. He follows the course of Flaubert's later years, without imposing any particular narrative structure or dramatic denouement. The Oyster Problem is primarily composed of anecdotes and ideas, and contains too few events to justify its runtime (two hours and twenty minutes). It could be heavily abridged without losing its charm.
Figes’s script is a captivating miscellany, more than anything else. Zola, frantically looking for a chamberpot, eventually urinates in a glass dish and shamefacedly hands it to the maid. We hear that Balzac supposedly believed abstinence was a route to creative productivity. After sleeping with a woman, he allegedly told a friend, "I’ve lost a whole book!" Turgenev reports, deadpan, his foolproof method to avoid anxiety about his own death: "When we Russians get caught in a snowstorm, we have a phrase: Don’t think about the cold, or you will die."
If you come looking for a gripping narrative, or an intense psychological study, you will be left cold. But if you’re intereted in witty anecdotes and/or French literary realism, you will be delighted. The Oyster Problem is small and beautiful and slightly misshapen; a remarkable pearl of a play.
Originally reviewed for Everything Theatre. The Oyster Problem is playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre until 4 March.