We never find out the name of Kay’s affliction. By not disclosing it, Mark Haddon questions its very existence, inviting us to make our own diagnosis. The title’s implication is that she has Bipolar Disorder and, sure enough, Kay endures more ups and downs than the Grand Old Duke of York’s ten thousand, but whether we classify that as a syndrome, as do her husband and mother, or, like her brother, a facet of her personality is left up to us.
Either way, Haddon sides unsympathetically with her carers, making a case against altruism. Polar Bears is, essentially, a love story of the can’t-live-with-can’t-live-without mould. Throughout the course of the play, John (Richard Coyle) meets, courts, marries, cares for and kills Kay, wrapping her corpse in a carpet bag to decay – a process we hear about in extensive detail. He vows to love her forever, through the magnetism and the mug-throwing, both as Jekyll and as Hyde, and yet, after enduring abuse, affairs and spontaneous absenteeism, John cannot fulfil that ongoing promise. His weakness is rather a strength ground down; he cares for her because he needs her as much as she needs his care. Likewise, Kay’s mother (a perfectly cast Celia Imrie) has spent her life warding off potential suitors, tending her daughter to the point of suffocation so as to clip her wings and prevent her flight.
Haddon, of course, wrote the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, an examination of autism made touching by his deft handling of kooky detail. That same quality is present in Polar Bears, but softened. Unlike a novel, theatre cannot make us privy to the whirring of Kay’s mind. We see her as others do, where we are given a privileged position in The Curious Incident.... For all Haddon’s attempts to offer an alternative more mystical – there are regular appeals to the phases of the moon and the lure of the North – we watch Kay as we would in life, firmly entrenched in our own worldview.
As such, we don’t learn so much about Kay and her own experience – although we are privy to a comatose hallucination in which Jesus arrives baring flapjacks and machine coffee– as we do about what it is to live with Kay. Haddon’s emphasising device is to muddle time, jump-cutting from high to low. Several times, Kay drops to the floor as if her blood sugar levels have nosedived without the slightest flicker of a warning light. John, therefore, seems constantly on tenterhooks, unable to predict the lurches from one day to the next. Though it ramps up the drama, as does the foreknowledge of Kay’s death, Haddon twists the truth slightly beyond credence by overplaying the situation’s volatility.
Director Jamie Lloyd makes the most of the jagged timescale, dragging us forcefully through the jumbled chronology. Vivid, but also – thanks to Soutra Gilmour’s dusty and sparse design – ghostly, Polar Bears does away with location. Its characters seem almost to hang suspended in the void, grating against one another while the world beyond them has disintegrated. They are all caught in Kay’s orbit with varying degrees of gravitational pull.
As Kay, Jodhi May is superb: she wears the swelling tides of personality just beneath the surface of her skin. When warm and attractive, she finds a hollowness; when slumped on the floor, a fervent passion. Coyle, again superbly cast, can’t quite make enough of John. He handles the first scene – a bewildered confession in which the details of Kay’s death leak out of him – with a keen sense for the humour and power of a swallowed bombshell. Paul Hilton, by contrast, constructs a fascinating character from Kay’s bitter brother Sandy. He’s frayed but held together by a well-tailored suit and hair-gel like glue. We are constantly aware of the turmoil beneath the constant snarl. The scars born of a twisted, privileged childhood – he gives a crisply lucid description of his father corpse hanging, bloated in the hallway – remain invisible but for the constant scratching.
For all this, Polar Bears is less than the sum of its parts. It’s a little see-through, particularly when asking questions of identity. Haddon’s writing veers dangerously close to latte-philosophy dressed up in beautiful language. No one, Kay informs us, has been killed by a polar bear for fifteen years. With its well-trimmed claws and lack of muscle, Haddon’s play is unlikely to change that.
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