Masochists and miserablists
Lloyd Evans
Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress Leicester Square Theatre Liberty Globe Sons of York Finborough
organ curator of the Royal Festival Hall.
But it was in America that the organ reached an apotheosis. Few places were better suited to the spread and growth of this monumental instrument. Aspirational values, civic idealism and philanthropic zeal — with seemingly bottomless reserves — all conspired to provide the ideal conditions for an epic organ craze. Organs sprung up in almost every municipal auditorium, the recitals attended by masses of obsessive fans. Some 10,000 turned up at the San Francisco municipal organ recital in 1917; 30,000 at the one at St Paul, Minnesota; and 20,000 at Cleveland, where the police ‘soon gave up in despair as an eager mob swept all before it’.
At the turn of the century, the organ had become the ultimate symbol of sophistication, money and power. And for the American oligarchs, the new home range from the Aeolian music company became the most impressive way to complete the country residence.
Andrew Carnegie had one installed in 1900 and hired the organist Walter C. Gale to play to him every morning. Henry Clay Frick wanted an organ to accompany his meals, so had one erected opposite his dining room. And Horace E. Dodge ordered one for his yacht. When the boat went up in smoke and sank in 1926, Dodge bought another boat and another organ. By 1911, the New York Times reported that 300 New York mansionowners had organs.
These extraordinary Twenties’ extravagances would be a final flourish, however. Changing tastes and the darkening economic times brought to an end this turn-of-thecentury obsession, ushering in a period of neglect and dereliction. ‘Serious musicians gradually begin to have no regard at all for these huge concert organs,’ explains Ian Bell; ‘they begin to jeer at them, and revile them. So that with the arrival of the gramophone and the radio ... the era was really over: these huge white elephants were left for dead.’ Today, the concert hall organ is slowly creeping back. The 1980s and 1990s saw abandoned instruments brought back to life, and the tradition of transcribing was renewed. Of course, the instrument won’t ever return to its former exalted position. Its dominance over modern life — its influence on culture and commerce, on the popular and the classical — has disappeared: its musical crown has gone. But what remains from that golden age is undeniably impressive: a troupe of 19thand 20th-century giants, musical monuments to the industrial revolution, whose sounds will ensure that they are unlikely to be forgotten. Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hipreplacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition. ‘Anyone see Elaine Stritch? Wonderful show wasn’t it? Mind you, it was all me, me, me, me, me, me. “I understudied Ethel Merman. And I drank. I worked with Noel Coward. And I drank. I tried to seduce Rock Hudson. And he drank.”’ At 75, Rivers is easy on the eye, like a well-set egg custard in a wig. Surgery has erased her face of its equine gauntness and given it a wholesome kittenish roundness which counterbalances her comic persona very well. That mix of cutesy innocence and toxic wit is irresistible, and when it comes to working a crowd she’s world class. But this show has higher ambitions.
Billed as a play, and set in her dressing room backstage at the Oscars where she’s about to conduct red-carpet interviews for a TV network, the show blends drama with stand-up. At its core is a sustained lament for the chronic instability of her showbiz career. Still haunted by the trauma of being sacked from a prime-time TV slot in 1990, Rivers cries out defiantly, ‘No one should have the right to take this away from me!’ And the crowd responds with tidal surges of tear-drenched applause. Fair enough. And now back to reality. Like it or not, TV execs do have the right — or rather the power — to terminate an employee’s contract. There’s no ‘should’ in a TV schedule. To pretend otherwise is a mawkish self-delusion. At times this show drifts away from humour and towards sentimentality, moralising, and even the sort of self-importance Rivers usually delights in exploding. Who’s idea was it to dress up a comedy routine as drama? It’s clumsy. Look at that awkward title. It’s unnecessary, too. Rivers is at her best doing her unique and outrageous gags. ‘When I was starting out I played any gig I was offered, even funerals. I’d open the coffin lid, sit the corpse up and do a ventriloquism act.’ To try and improve on that is to misunderstand one’s appeal which, paradoxically, is the very error Rivers imputes to the TV suits.
The Globe season ends in sheer misery. Which is fine, if sheer misery’s your passion. Glyn Maxwell’s version of Anatole France’s novel, The Gods Are Athirst, takes us into the heart of the French revolution. We follow a character based on Robespierre who is transformed, very, very slowly, from an inspired humanitarian into a bloodthirsty tyrant. Aside from the slow-coach narration, the unappealing characters and some desperately smug acting, the real problem is the blank-verse dialogue which is as lofty and vacuous as a hot-air balloon. I heard one lady exclaim, ‘Absolutely atrocious,’ as the first 82-minute act ground to a halt but when I spotted her returning for the second half I realised she was one of the masochists and miserablists the show is aimed at.
She’s in for a treat if she’s already booked a ticket for Sons of York at the Finborough. This grim-oop-north drama is set in Hull during the winter of discontent and it traces a working-class family as they grapple with the issues that will shortly face the electorate. Writer James Graham certainly has the gift of accuracy and he portrays the bigotry, insularity, cultural myopia, emotional immaturity and sheer nastiness of life in this freezing backwater with horrible naturalism. The main character, Dad, is a garrulous small-minded bully who makes Fred Dibnah sound like Socrates. But Graham also wants to add metaphor to his melodrama. While Dad trumpets his desire for a general strike, ‘One out all out. That principle’s sacred,’ he can’t bring himself to admit that his ga-ga wife will never recover from her dementia. The poor woman is shown writhing on a Draylon sofa in her soiled nappies, muttering gibberish and vomiting over her eiderdown. This episode takes place during a power cut while her grandson, in the same room, is trying to wash himself in a tin bath. Does the spewing old ruin represent British socialism? Is the bookish grandson a proto-yuppie? The scene isn’t funny enough to work as comedy and it’s too clotted and gruesome to appeal on a symbolic level. The show’s best asset is Steven Webb as the teenage lad. One to watch, Webb has enough talent and unselfconscious charm to light up any show he’s in. Even during a power cut.
Previous page
