Theatre

New view

Giles Gordon

Brighton Beach Memoirs (Curran) Loot (Geary) Uncle Vanya (Geary) San Francisco New readers don't start here. In the latest Neil Simon comedy, Brighton Beach Memoirs, which I caught on its way to, no doubt, a long Broadway run, seven members of a Polish/Jewish/American family eat dinner in the dining room of their suburban house at Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Only the father, a salesman soon to be made redundant, understands what is happening to the world. The date is September 1937. Stanley is an Arthur Miller character, surviving in spite of everything. By the end of the play he receives a letter from relatives in Warsaw. They're already on their way to America, and they'll be housed in the dining room. Meals in future will be taken in the kitchen.

/ The first act strongly urges that Mr Simon, despite precedent, has created a masterpiece a la Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce. Young Matthew Broderick, playing 15-year-old Eugene, who introduces the characters and comments on the action, gives a star performance. Eugene keeps a diary of the family's calamities, a Pooter of the Depression. His conversations with his elder brother about puberty, masturbation, girls and sex are hilarious, and it takes something special to make those subjects fresh. The boy is astounded to learn that, as a child, even President Roosevelt whacked off.

Neil Simon is no Chekhov although in this play Chekovisation is, I guess, what he thinks he's about. Rather, Brighton Beach Memoirs is a Death of a Salesman for the unthinking (but not thoughtless). The multi-roomed, two-floored house (set by David Mitchell) suggests the frames of a strip cartoon, and the characters bizarrely hint at 'Peanuts'. In Act One Mr Simon shows his characters just being, and it's well observed, unpretentious, touching. (An Irish family, called Murphy, live opposite. Someone criticises them. Says Eugene's Ma: 'Since when have the Jews and Irish fought?') In the second act he aims at

significance and heartbreak, which is a mistake. Strip cartoon characters shouldn't have three-dimensional lives. Nevertheless, I suspect it's Mr Simon's best play, and consequently, when it reaches New York and later London, will be over-praised.

Most worthwhile playwrights ask ques- tions; Joe Orton provides answers. He is the first dramatist, not forgetting Wilde, to propose that good and bad taste, morality as it affects social behaviour, is neither more nor less than language. As the subject matter of Loot concerns robbery and murder, his point — which our education, history and religion make it hard for us to accept — is that language is neutral. Whereas British productions of the play project it as outrageous artifice, the American Conservatory Theatre stages it as everyday life.

The set resembles Orton's bedsitter. On the walls are a Union Jack, holy pictures, horse brasses, a dart-board, pin-ups. Act One is prefaced by a recording of Big Ben, Act Two followed by the National Anthem: no one stood to attention, and Her Majesty (not Queen Victoria, which is an alias of Fay, the play's murderess, played by the delectable Sally Smythe) was in California that day. Orton's naughtiness had done its work.

Loot's stance is of reverence, not ir- reverence. The playwright loves our institu- tions, and mocks only to take the mickey or the piss. He clearly approves of policemen but not of fools or the corrupt: Sydney Walker's Truscott of the Yard is a per- manently puzzled creation, smug Metro- politan veneer grafted onto Clouseau. Ray Reinhardt plays the widower McLeavy with an authentic Irish accent, and many of the scenes suggest both O'Casey and Beckett, which I hope suggests how richly naturalistic Ken Ruta's production is.

The farcical elements derive from the ac- tors' commitment to the text. Orton's genius was in recording the cliches of every- day, hypocritical English life and placing them in a setting; an exotic silversmith. It's interesting that a respectable American cast makes the play seem more truly English than the plays of, say, Osborne or Wesker. Please, Peter Hall, may Harold Pinter direct Loot at the National?

The grey slatted walls and heavily carved

wooden columns of Professor Serebryakov's country estate rise solemnly to the flies. An unburnished samovar is stage centre. Off stage, a balalaika plays. Chekhov country. Then the set is drenched in light, and living continues. The American Conservatory Theatre is presen- ting the US premiere of Pam Gems's translation of Uncle Vanya, directed by Helen Burns and Michael Langham, which we saw — staged and played mutedly — at the National last year. In San Francisco it aspires, almost, to opera with a libretto that denies the need for music. It is a further stage in the theatre's humanisation of the wise physician; comic writer indeed, and the tragedy of these provincial lives is all the greater for the humour, in the sense

employed both by Feydeau and by Jonson.

The nurse (Joan Croydon) is a clucking' ironical, handsome woman with her wits about her, not the usual droll old dear. Waffles could come from The Alchemist, or serve as Rosencrantz or Guildenstern: he sycophantically reveres the professor, and eavesdrops constantly. Yelena is played with distilled passion by the very beautiful Deborah May. She admits to her love for Astrov too late, yet comes back and back for kisses: it is he who dismisses her, insists it is over. Barbara Dirickson as SonYa relieves the poor child of her usual wetness by laughing against herself. But it is in the interpretations of Astrov (Peter Donat) and Vanya (Dakin Matthews) that Mr and Mrs Langham and the actors excel. They play broadly and daringly, take

huge risks. The scene where they drindrinktogether, with Waffles strumming his

guitar, is more than a little reminiscent of Belch, Aguecheek and Feste in a vintage Twelfth Night. And Astrov and Yelena discovered in the act of kissing by VanY, bearing flowers which seem to wilt and die as he understands what is happening, Is simultaneously side-splitting and appalling' Everything seems inevitable, as it does when Vanya, aiming at killing the PI- headed professor, as if shooting his wife s lover in an hotel bedroom, dislodges the roof of the stove and smoke envelops the stage. This is the kind of gutsy, fit? blooded production by the leading American classical company which we used to have in Britain. Remember Olivier s Chichester Uncle Vanya?