How I Learned to Drive at the Donmar Warehouse – Review

Those interested in tracing that thrilling moment when a promising young performer becomes a star should make tracks to the Donmar Warehouse, where the dark-haired, throaty-voiced Helen McCrory is giving the female performance of the year so far in Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive.” American visitors, of course, may feel they already know every backroad of Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, especially now that it looks to be produced throughout the United States. But there’s no way to prepare for the impact of McCrory’s fierce take on a character who is a survivor, yes, but at an enormous psychological price. Abetted by a production from the Donmar’s new associate director, John Crowley, that is every bit her equal, McCrory grabs the wheel of this sorrowful, shimmering play, and — as Li’l Bit herself might say — floors it.

Much of the talk during the play’s Off Broadway stand focused on Uncle Peck, the lasting specter in Li’l Bit’s life whose driving lessons, beginning at age 11, form a sexual initiation for a physically precocious adolescent. At age 13, we’re told by her nearly 40-year-old self, she had the body of a 20-year-old, an anatomical fact that her softly spoken uncle considers “a blessing” even as the adult Li’l Bit learns to loathe “anything that jiggles.”

The New York production (at least when I caught it late on) took a brighter view — literally, in Mark McCullough’s lighting — of Li’l Bit’s fate: This is a woman, after all, able to make a narrative out of a sexual confusion that, mixed with drink, finally kills her uncle. But without in any way distorting Vogel’s script, the London version occupies a shadowy realm of anxiety and blame as well as forgiveness. Not for nothing does the Donmar’s ever-estimable lighting designer, Paul Pyant, cast looming reflections on the theater’s back wall even when the action center-stage looks to be innocent.

The extent of Uncle Peck’s damage is evident even if, as Li’l Bit remarks late on, its causes remain unclear. And Kevin Whately’s skillful, thoroughly honest interpretation charts a man subsumed by a hunger so deep that his needs are sometimes painful to watch: He elicits compassion even as he chills the blood, never more so than in his (scarily incomplete) reminiscence about a fishing trip with his tearful Cousin Bobby.

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Mandatory Credit: Photo by Alastair Muir/Shutterstock (10639844b)
Helen McCrory. Kevin Whately
‘How I Learned to Drive, Play performed at the Donmar Theatre, London, UK 1998 – 07 May 2020

What, then, of Li’l Bit? Yes, the person McCrory presents looks strong and capable, and yet those warm, big eyes are alert to life’s abrasions. This is a girl-turned-woman who can knock back booze with the best of them and whose academic life falls to pieces in accordance with her physical self-regard. Tellingly, suicidal tendencies at the wheel are kept at bay only by the driving lessons of her youth: “He taught me well” is her early — and eerie — summation.

It’s important to Vogel’s play, too, that Li’l Bit’s family does as little as possible to help. Grandma’s views on sex barely classify as folkloric, while her mother fills her from the start with an accompanying guilt. Perhaps worst of all is her quietly scalding Aunt Mary, who is willing to absolve Uncle Peck only insofar as she can shift the blame onto a niece whom she dismisses as “sly.” Doubling as both mother and aunt, Jenny Galloway completes an invaluable hat trick at this theater that has included the Donmar stagings of “Electra” and “Nine”; her choric partners, Philippa Stanton and Michael Colgan, are scarcely less fine.

In the end, though, it’s impossible to look away from McCrory, who at every moment fends off what in other hands might be arch or even cute. If the play’s ending on this occasion is quite simply overwhelming, it’s because we’re always aware of the pain that underpins Li’l Bit’s hard-won bravura. On one level, this is a play about the birth of a writer: a woman who, as Li’l Bit reports, lives “inside the ‘fire’ in my head.” But, McCrory makes plain, it’s also about the scars we carry even when most proud, as borne out by a heroine who can forgive but will never, ever forget.