Switzerland is a sly and wicked portrait of celebrated writer Patricia Highsmith in her twilight years, in self-imposed exile in the nation of precise time-keeping and super weapons.
The superb script is from Joanna Murray-Smith, one of Australia’s leading playwrights. Sarah Goodes, also from Australia, directed the premier season of Switzerland in 2014 to widespread acclaim.
The original actor who played Highsmith in 2014, Sarah Pierse, makes up a formidable triumvirate.
The production is immediately tense and uneasy, a comedy of manners which barely hides a monster ego and psychopathic rapaciousness. It lures the observer into all this and then delights in subtly undermining everything. It is very much a tale of Highsmith being deconstructed by someone who is using Patricia’s own pen to do this.
You can enjoy it at the same level as the best of the author’s work.
Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921. The first ten years of her life saw the most turbulent, exhilarating, innovative and destructive decade the world has likely seen. It set the stage for the next hundred years, and we entered a parallel world to this in 2020. The rhyme of history.
She claimed her mother tried to abort her. Her actual father left before her birth. Great artists, like psychopaths, seem to spring from nowhere, in America. The quote is a reference to Elvis and Buddy Holly, but it is accurate for Highsmith as well.
She studied English Literature at college in New York but was rejected repeatedly by all the celebrated literary institutions.
It took a recommendation from Truman Capote ironically, to get her a place in a writer’s retreat. From there she produced her famous debut, Strangers on a Train, which also captured Alfred Hitchcock.
The stage is set as a well-to-do Swiss chalet. The centrepiece is a log fire and this focuses the attention before any players appear. A writing desk is at right, a spiral staircase to the left.
Fire is the cleansing element, consuming and regenerative.
Highsmith (Sarah Pierse) appears first. She stomps in and immediately starts clacking on a typewriter. In the mid-Nineties this is defiantly anti-technology.
A young man from New York City, appears in her lounge. He introduces himself as Edward Ridgeley (Jarred Blakiston). Let the hostilities begin!
He is an emissary from Highsmith’s publishers, with a mission to persuade her to produce one more Ripley novel.
Her most celebrated creation. A suave and dapper killer who manages to win the sympathy of the reader by being morally ambiguous. He admires the people he kills. He just desires what they have.
Love is murder pops out of Highsmith’s mouth in one of her monologues. The Ripliad stretched to five novels.
She is a bitter old woman in her exile. Her real American publisher Otto Penzler described her as a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being/ Relentlessly ugly/ But her books are brilliant. Obviously had a tender spot for her in her Faustian bind.
Highsmith was a lesbian, with many partners. She found enduring relationships constricting. Often, she would prefer the intellectual company of men but not their physical presence. She had strong racist and anti-Semitic views.
This comes out as she spars with her gentleman caller, who remains weak and fawning. The more he tells her how great she is, the more she gets infuriated and tells him to go fuck himself. She is adept at the art of the surgical strike to eviscerate.
At certain moments the dialogue takes delight in putting other writers to the to the sharp steely knife. Vonnegut (fair enough), Greene (he called her the poet of apprehension), and to Mailer who she desperately tries to kick in the groin. He would be her equal in his psychological profiling of dangerous characters.
She does have a nocturnal tender spot for F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose Great Gatsby could be one inspirational source for Ripley.
But there is an unseen serpent in the room and the tables are slowly turned. One of the secrets of combat is to know the adversary’s strengths. Stay in close and let those thunderbolts come.
Eventually there will be the way in. Identities are revealed, as the Ego is breached by the Id.
The play is too clever for spoilers. I will liken it to act three of Francis Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. When Captain Willard finally gets to meet Colonel Kurtz.
Patricia Highsmith was one of the greatest thriller writers, with her ability to peel back the layers of the psyche which would connect the reader with their own guilty desires. Personality becomes fluid and transmutable.
With Switzerland, we have a delightfully macabre and unsettling story, with both actors appearing to be at the top of their game.
The last word to the great writer herself from 1947. To all the devils, lusts, passions, greed, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories with which I do battle, may they never give me peace.
Rev Orange Peel
Switzerland runs through 7 October at the ASB Waterfront Theatre. More information and tickets available HERE.
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