A gift for rhetoric
Lloyd Evans
The Critic Pentameters Dick Whittington Barbican Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks Theatre Royal, Haymarket It’s always puzzled me that so few theatre critics are involved in making (rather than interpreting, dissecting and sometimes destroying) theatre. Hats off to Time Out reviewer Robert Shore, who’s quitted the breaker’s yard for the production line. Anxious about this new departure, he admits he ‘finds criticism almost impossible to bear’, although he ‘doesn’t mindpointing out problems with other people’s work’. Yeah, I know the feeling.
In his new play, The Critic, a sneering old-school reviewer (bow tie, goatee, crimson dressing-gown) is ambushed in his house by two actors whose performances he has rubbished. Nice idea. Shore relies heavily on his gift for rhetoric and he brilliantly articulates the mood of frustration and boredom which is the constant mental state of the reviewer. ‘You have stolen a night of my life!’ cries Harry Meacher in a terrific performance as the queeny, preeny critic. And the play boasts a wonderful surprise ending in the shape of Saskia Willis who suddenly ... well, I’d better not give it away. And because Shore doesn’t like criticism I’ll refrain from mentioning that a bit of subplotting would have strengthened the script, and he might have introduced a twist that involved the emotional development of the characters rather than a narrative hand grenade lobbed in at the last minute. The show is stylishly directed by Conrad Blakemore, who serenades the audience before curtain-up with a medley of blues hits.
To the Barbican for Mark Ravenhill’s Dick Whittington and the inevitable scene in which Dick’s cat pleads to be sodomised with a screwdriver. But Ravenhill has left his toolbox at home and dashed off an exuberant, celebratory and deeply conserva tive pantomime. The costumes are gorgeous, the songs highly hummable and the production oozes bonhomie and Christmas zest.
But the storyline is not well integrated and in places the script is so lazy that Roger Lloyd Pack (a curiously perfunctory Dame) felt moved to apologise for the gags. ‘I don’t write them, I just learn them.’ The wonderful Sam Kelly, looking like a blend of Arthur Lowe and Donald Pleasence, is an absolute treasure as the stingy alderman, and his captivatingly silly performance drives the show forward. The audience, who loved it from start to finish, were encouraged to throw critical comments at the actors. The company returned fire with huge water pistols and Quality Street hurled into the stalls with catapults. I took a chocolate marshmallow on the nose. At nearly three hours, the shows offers plenty of panto to the pound but it means the littlest of the little ’uns are squirming with fatigue by the end. If your kids are under seven, get a babysitter.
At the Haymarket, Richard Alfieri’s cheesy lightweight new play, Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks, prompted a familiar lament. You have stolen a night of my life! The play follows the chaste friendship between Lily, a bored elderly widow, and her gay dance instructor. It reminded me of a funfair. Pretty colours, bright lights and lots of dashing about. That’s all you need at Christmas because the punters only totter up to the West End once a year.
But as the play went on it began to get to me. The corny, one-way script acquires shades of feeling as the characters (Claire Bloom and Billy Zane — exquisite casting) exchange their experiences of loneliness and grief. In the second half, the writing becomes acute and splendidly witty. When Lily blurts out that she is 72 rather than 68, as she had claimed, she adds, ‘If you say your real age out loud, your face hears.’ The characters’ prim neediness becomes, in some unfathomable way, deeply affecting and by the end I was almost reaching for the Kleenex.
Christopher Woods’s marvellous costumes are presented with just the right dash of satire, and his ingenious pensioner’s condominium, a subtle arrangement of beige planes, is the setting for a brilliant final coup. The apartment slides away to reveal a gorgeous vision of the Florida skyline at twilight. Bloom and Zane dance in silhouette as the sun slips below the horizon and a shooting star the size of Pluto falls towards the Gulf of Mexico so fast that it would almost certainly trigger a Texas-drowning tsunami. But let’s not quibble. This show has something festive and appealing. Love. The writer clearly adores the medium of dance. The stars love performing the play, and their charming regard for one another comes through very powerfully. Too much love? Maybe, but it’s a love that lets you in.
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