Japes (Theatre Royal Haymarket) Mouth to Mouth (Royal Court) Feelgood (Hampstead)
Pleasure and pain
Patrick Carnegy
In the run-up to the opening of Simon Gray's Tapes there's been a lot of noise, some of it coming from Gray himself, about his alcoholism, dastardly treatment at the hands of directors, and about chucking it all in. It sounded rather like an invitation to help fan the flames at a valedictory self-immolation — or maybe just smart publicity. The good news is that whatever hells have gone into the writing
of the play and the securing of its production by Peter Hall and his Company, it's a triumph. The bottles on the drinks table at the Hampstead home in which Tapes is set testify only to Gray's victory over his alcoholic self. In truth the demon is no more than a secondary strand in a story about how Michael, a rather tight-arsed novelist, and his younger brother Japes, a dissolute charmer, deal with the woman they share across a 27-year span in their lives. Anita is married to Michael but emotionally entangled only with Japes, whose long absences teaching English abroad only make her heart grow fonder. All three are bound together by the house the brothers have been left by their father, and by Wendy, the daughter brought up as Michael's but who everyone knows is really fathered by Japes.
The pleasure, and the pain, is in how Gray shows the tragedy gathering momentum through successive phases — how the girlfriend becomes the wife of the stolidly cold Michael, how Japes is rescued by him from the terminal alcoholism in which he's buried his pain, and how at the last Michael, now famous and a bastion of the Garrick, struggles to cope with the accidental love-death of his wife and brother and the survival of the grown-up Wendy. Through all this nothing is ever simple. Toby Stephens perfectly catches Japes's progress from an insouciant, knowing charmer to a man who's thrown away everything he's ever cared about. Even more affecting is the way in which Jasper Britton's Michael gains uneasy control over the lie that they've all learnt to live with, only to be undone by Wendy. It's hard not to disclose that she's the reincarnation of her mother, both roles superlatively well played by Clare Swinburne, her every look and gesture drawn from the powerful emotional undertow that makes this such a richly satisfying play. The only element that doesn't ring quite true is why Wendy has to put Michael through the third degree when she must surely have known that he'd have given her everything anyway. But maybe this unflinching sadism is just how modern kids revenge themselves on those who've been less than totally attentive to their needs.
One hazard of being resuscitated from drowning is that it could land you in an erotic situation. In the case of Mouth to Mouth, Kevin Elyot's second play for the Royal Court (directed by Ian Rickson), this is of a homosexual nature. Phillip, the teenage beneficiary of this particular kissof-life, seems to have taken it in his stride. But it's not long before Laura, his mum, is discovering that he's subsequently been taught to tango and seduced in Spain by — a girl. The real horror is that he ended up with her name tattooed across his crotch. Bad enough for Laura's pride in her boy, far worse for his aquatic rescuer, the sensifive Frank, close friend of the family and HIV-stricken playwright. Frank, by now on his knees, insists on inspecting the damning evidence of normality (removable by laser, were told) before launching a fresh assault on his rescuee. The effects of Laura's and Frank's attentions lead to Phillip's death in a motorbike accident, leaving both in a limbo of guilt and self-recrimination with which the play, told in flashback, both begins and ends. Elyot's evocation of their pain is affecting and beautifully acted by Michael Maloney and Lindsay Duncan.
The pollsters spelling gloom for the Tories would have told another story if they'd spoken to anyone lucky enough to have seen Alistair Beaton's Feelgood, directed by Max Stafford-Clark at the Hampstead Theatre. It's political satire as we hardly ever know it and is every bit as sharp and funny as Yes, Minister. The play is driven principally by Old Labour grievance against Blair, but will delight his enemies of every political colour. Beaton brilliantly destabilises the Third Way, ridiculing it as a third sex generated by a GM accident on the land of a Tony-crony in the Lords (the exquisitely bemused Nigel Planer). Attempting to keep the lid on the scandal is Henry Goodman's Eddie, a Campbell/Mandelson cross-breed masterfully manipulating his speech-writer (Jeremy Swift), jokesmith (Pearce Quigley) and leftie journalist (Sian Thomas) whose agenda is the redistribution of wealth and renationalisation of the railways. You don't meet the PM (Nigel Cooke/Jonathan Cullen) until his conference speech at the very end but this is a treat that crowns a superbly acted, hilarious and hard-hitting show.
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