Nightingale Reviews: Lynn Redgrave’s Triumph Over Tragedy

It is nearly impossible to judge “Nightingale,” the universally-praised play at the Manhattan Theater Club that Lynn Redgrave has written and performs about her little-known and chilly maternal grandmother, as just another evening at the theater. There are several reasons for this.

The Redgraves are among the most renowned acting family dynasties, with five generation of famous theater and/or film actors starting with Lynn’s grandfather, and including Sir Michael Redgrave (Lynn’s father), Vanessa Redgrave (sister), Natasha Richardson and Joely Richardson (nieces).

The tragedies visited upon the Redgraves over the past few years are exceeded only by Lynn’s own personal traumas: As Linda Winer of Newsday sums it up: “her catastrophic divorce, her mastectomy, the death of her actress mother, the heart attack of her actor brother and the death of her niece, Natasha Richardson, about whom she says, ‘a bright light is gone.’” Lynn Redgrave is so hobbled by illness that she must perform sitting down with the script in front of her.

“So it’s a special pleasure – not to mention a bit of a relief,” Winer writes, “to report that “Nightingale” broadens beyond the particulars into an imaginative, compelling, cannily constructed 85 minutes about far more than we think we already know.

John Simon writes:
“Lynn Redgrave’s solo performance in “Nightingale,” which she also wrote, marks a triple triumph: For the woman, battling cancer for four years; for the actress, at her peak after four decades; and for the Redgrave clan, which hereby surpasses the mighty Barrymores as the royal family of stage and screen.”

Marilyn Stasio in Variety: A desk, a chair, an open script, an actress with a story to tell and a passion to be heard — that’s all it takes for Lynn Redgrave to hold us in the palm of her hand for another of her searching one-woman plays about her famous family. Unlike previous pieces about her father, Sir Michael Redgrave (“Shakespeare for My Father”), and mother, Rachel Kempson (“The Mandrake Root”), this one is more fiction than memoir. Written with a sense of urgency, “Nightingale” is an attempt to connect with the maternal grandmother she barely knew: “that chilly ghost whose hands were always cold.”

Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times: “this spare, astringent look at the life of a Victorian woman is infused with a chilly sense of the limitations and disappointments of women’s lives — both then and now — and the shrinking of the spirit that can result…Ms. Redgrave’s imagined memoirs of her grandmother’s life are interspersed with recollections of her own, as she notes some sad correspondences. Breaking up the narrative of Beatrice’s disappointing experience are passages in which Ms. Redgrave recounts her own marriage to a man she scarcely knew — they had dated for all of two weeks before deciding to wed — and the emptiness that followed.”

The most eloquent voice about “Nightingale” is by Lynn Redgrave herself in an essay on the MTC Web site entitled Why I Write, the first line of which is “It never occurred to me that I could write” and the last paragraph:

“I cannot imagine how I previously lived my life without writing plays. And it’s only the theatre I write for. I don’t want to write a novel, or a memoir or a screenplay. Just words and emotions and stories that involve that living organism, “the live audience.” All of my plays have been produced and with each production I learn more and more about telling stories. With Nightingale I am now writing with two voices: Lynn, the writer who must find the missing connection between herself, and her less than lovable grandmother. Although she left us many years ago and at the time I wasn’t close to her, I reach out to her now because life’s journey in the last few years has been filled with speed bumps. I must hold hands with both the living and the dead in my family. Or I am lost, shipwrecked at this crossroads in my life. And the other voice is my Grandmother herself, Beatrice Kempson. And as the play progresses I look to find myself within her life. And I keep writing myself jobs. An actor makes his own luck!…”