Revelatory Richie
Lloyd Evans Lone Star & Pvt. Wars King's Head We The People Globe All About My Mother Old Vic The King's Head has a deserved hit on its hands with a James McLure double bill about soldiers haunted by Vietnam. Emasculation is the linking theme and the scripts dance nimbly between the opposing poles of pathos and high comedy. James Jagger (handsome boy, highly watchable, famous dad) has a very promising line in wry comedy. But the real revelation here, to me at least, is Shane Richie, whom I last saw hosting game shows on telly. I thought that's all he did. But what an actor. His two performances are expertly differentiated from one other. First, he's Roy, a strutting peacock of a veteran whose life implodes when he learns that his wife has seduced his brother. After the interval he plays Silvio, a darker, richer, funnier, sadder role, a war invalid who compulsively exposes himself to nurses. Richie is an actor of amazing range and depth and he has that unteachable knack of reaching straight for the audience's nervous fibres. Having seen him shine in these exceptional tragicomedies I doubt if there's a stage role he couldn't succeed in.
At the Globe, another American play. We The People examines the four-monthlong convention which in 1787 produced the American constitution. Constitutions are fascinating documents and their creation can certainly be dramatic. What it cannot be is theatrical. You'd need a Thucydides to turn these clotted lumps of discussion and negotiation into literary art. Instead, we have Eric Schlosser, a journalist and grudge-monger, who's more interested in the founding fathers' reluctance to abolish slavery than in their bold experiments in nation-building. The story lacks a decent plot or a central personality and this ambitious, turgid production is wastefully lavish: three dozen characters, rifle fights, live cannon fire, costly and fetching costumes and even George Washington's white charger trotting in from the wings with its owner on board. Yet the three-hour script teaches us virtually zilch about the constitution and the less experienced actors need elementary coaching. Display less, feel more. Pouting, preening and eyebrow-cocking makes you look like sixth-formers having a stab at Gilbert and Sullivan. Poor lovely Globe. I've never seen it so empty.
No such problems at the Old Vic. Kevin Spacey's riskiest experiment so far has paid off brilliantly. Films and plays are such different creatures that kitting one out in the garb of the other is asking for trouble and this show, the first-ever Almodovar stage adaptation, could easily have been a humiliating flop. Like many film-makers, Pedro Almodovar makes the most of the not-verymuch he has to offer. His virtues are exaggerated, his failings underplayed. His slick and superficially exotic movies are marred by sentimentality, lazy plotting, silly coincidences and a rich crust of improbability. (Two examples here: a respectable nurse dresses as a hooker in order to get a job working as a chef for an art-forger; and a beautiful young nun is impregnated by a middle-aged HIV-positive cross-dressing restaurateur-turned-rent-boy. Yeah, I know. It happens all the time.) Almodovar rarely locates his dramas in the everyday world and instead indulges his preference for fashionably damaged types, druggies, trannies, divas and whores and other psychological bombsites. Not exactly a mainstream talent then but this production looks and feels like a hit because, despite its off-beat fixations, it somehow captures the ragged, precious nature of real life. And I say this as an Almodo-phobe who finds most of his films unwatchable.
Never mind the daft and rambling plot which concerns a mother's quest to find her dead boy's father. Marvel instead at Lesley Manville's subtle and gradual entrapment of one's sympathy as Manuela, the sonless mother. Hildegard Bechtler's design fulfils its primary function perfectly: to deaden our awareness that this is a cinema adaptation. The set embraces dozens of scene changes and flashbacks and though it's elaborate it never seems cumbersome. And Diana Rigg gives a fantastically charismatic and witty performance as Huma, a lesbian drama-queen starring as Blanche DuBois in a touring production of Streetcar. There are several scenes showing the play-within-theplay and Rigg manages to convince us that she could, even at her age, play Blanche. How? The only explanation is that she could, even at her age, play Blanche. In the closing tableau she delivers the great speech from Lorca's Blood Wedding pleading for endurance, resignation and love. Here the show touches greatness. Let's hope this production will silence the 'Oh my God, Spacey's really blown it this time' brigade. At least till the next big production which— quills out, chaps — opens in January.
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