Theatre
Baby Doll (National) Helpless (Donmar Warehouse)
Bruised angel
Sheridan Morley
The turn of this century is proving an amazingly rich time for the National The- atre to prospect for gold down in old Ten- nessee. After Vanessa and Corin Redgrave's breathtaking rediscovery of Not About Nightingales, the long-lost first major Tennessee Williams script at the Cottesloe, we now have on the Lyttelton stage some- thing equally enthralling: the first-ever staging of his 1956 screenplay Baby Doll.
This was the Carroll Baker/Karl Malden/Eli Wallach movie which carried the proud boast 'Banned by Cardinal Spell- man' on just about the last occasion that the Catholic Church forgot how its bans have a habit of misfiring. What is fascinat- ing about the new Lucy Bailey production, into the National from the Birmingham Rep, is the way in which she has managed to take an often sketchy and fragmentary screenplay and turn it into a drama of real substance, able now to stand alongside the best of Williams's plays.
Bunny Christie's set has a brilliant, dolls'-house quality, with individual rooms opening up in darkness to give you the sense that you are peering into them; and in one of them of course is the child bride, Baby Doll herself, the character who gave her name to millions of knee-length night- dresses. As played by Charlotte Emmerson, she no longer comes across as the Lolita of the Deep South, but instead as another of Williams's bruised angels forever hoping, like Blanche duBois, to depend on the kindness of strangers. In this case the stranger is Silva Vaccaro, broodingly well played by yet another com- parative newcomer, Jonathan Cake; but his interest goes beyond the sexual. He needs Baby Doll to sign a statement proving the criminality of her husband (Paul Brennen), who, in the third great performance of the evening, has agreed not to sleep with his bride until their repossessed furniture has been reclaimed. At times this is almost a parody of the world of Tennessee Williams; yet so hauntingly is it played, on a set which also manages to feature a rusting Chevy and great bales of cotton as high as the eye can see, that by the end you are totally caught up in yet another sweaty saga of the sweet bird of youth being brutally awoken to a world of rape and revenge.
At a time when all too few playwrights are prepared to tackle the way we live now in any political or national sense, it is really good to have Dusty Hughes back. From the time of his Commitments through his tele- vision work on Between the Lines he has been one of the very few contemporary playwrights willing to look at Britain rather than his own reflection in a stage mirror, and Helpless is a rich and rare confronta- tion between the 1960s generation of socialist idealists and their children, who 30 years on know of nothing but Thatcher and Blair.
But Hughes has always been better at characters than plot, and here there are some truly wonderful creations: Ron Cook as an actor best-known for appearances in tele-commercials, where symbolically he plays The Worried Man for an insurance company; Art Malik as his best friend, a failed historian who now makes a fortune writing airport blockbusters under a female pseudonym; Craig Kelly as the actor's demented son, who has the funniest moments in a stand-up routine as a mini- cab booker gone berserk as he tries to jug- gle his own life and those of his missing drivers.
And then there are the women: Julie Graham as Kate, desperate to have a baby by the actor; Rachael Stirling, unmistakably Diana Rigg's daughter in her professional debut, as the actor's daughter who goes to live with his best friend; and Charlotte Cornwell as the actor's first wife, now a chilly relief worker in Africa where she may inadvertently have killed a few colleagues. In this uneasy, inbred, cross-referenced and deeply confused sextet Hughes has seen a metaphor and a microcosm of modern British society; an episodic, fragmented, sometimes sheer soap-operatic plot of chance meetings and unlikely coincidences is time and again rescued by his sharp, sav- age eye for character sketching. Once again here we are dealing with commitment, whether to a cause or a country or just another lost soul, not waving but drowning as he or she tries to make some sense of how, precisely, we got ourselves from the 1960s to the 1990s. Someone should even- tually put Helpless in a time capsule, prefer- ably on video, to explain to future social historians just what did go wrong with us at the end of the 20th century.
In regard to the padlocked stairs leading from the centre of Sloane Square down to the new Royal Court bar (Arts, 4 March), I was wrong to accuse the Cadogan Estate of intransigence; they are merely reflecting the terms of their own lease with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, who are the ultimate keyholders. So could they please now unlock it?
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