The Collector
Pyewacket
Fowles’s The Collector–adapted for the Stone Circle Theatre Ensemble by artistic director Jessica McCartney and directed by Jennifer Shook–is at heart a horror story despite allusions to Shakespeare’s The Tempest and occasional critiques of the British class system. The 1965 film of the same name, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar and directed by William Wyler, was advertised with the tag line “You won’t dare open your mouth, but you’ll be screaming for her to escape!” In essence the story of a woman at the mercy of her malevolent captor, The Collector is like “Beauty and the Beast” but with no possibility of the evildoer being transformed into a handsome prince. Miranda’s attempts to escape from her underground prison have the desperate air of banging on the lid of a coffin nailed shut (an image used to grisly effect in the nasty, grim 1988 Dutch thriller The Vanishing, which owes a great debt to both Fowles’s novel and Wyler’s film).
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Setting his drama at the height of cold war paranoia, Weller has self-consciously drawn overt parallels between Andrew and Elise’s strained relationship and U.S. and Russian hostilities. During a school assembly, Martin gives a speech about the cold war: “Perhaps we have more in common than you know,” he opines. When Andrew discusses his past as a rebel, he laments what could have been done “if we all just held together.” And when Andrew and Elise are finally and tragically brought together, one of them suggests that their “war of silence” has “outlived any usefulness.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Charissa Armon.
