Theatre

The Lodger (Stratford East) The Alchemist (National Theatre) Accommodating Eva (King's Head)

Sinister happenings

Sheridan Morley

At Stratford East there is a rare chance to see a staging of Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger, a Jack the Ripper thriller famously filmed by Hitchcock with Ivor Novello in .1926 and then twice remade when the talkies came in, first with Novello himself and then in 1944 with Laird Cre- gar. The theatre is, of course, only a matter of streets away from where the Ripper dis- embowelled five prostitutes, and Mrs Lowndes's tale reeks of fog and sinister happenings in the small hours. Its central figure is a landlady (Lynn Farleigh in fine suppressed sexuality) who takes in a myste- rious tenant, a man of apparently no fixed abode who is known as Mr Sleuth.

He it is who makes strange nocturnal exits from the house and who has suddenly to dispose of rubber-soled shoes once they have been announced by the police as the Ripper's footwear. But the brilliance of Mrs Lowndes (arguably the first psycholog- ical thriller-waster of the 1920s) is that she neither tells us whether he really is the Ripper nor that it much matters.

Instead, her focus is on the landlady who. unhappily married to a low-achieving and complaisant husband, sees in Sleuth an escape into a fractionally more upmarket world. He. however, has other things on his mind, and she decides that so nicely spoken and well-dressed a man, despite his rubber- soled shoes, is unlikely to be the one cur- rently ripping up the nearby ladies of the night.

Philip Hedley has framed his minimalist but often moving production within flash- backs to Madame Tussaud's, where Murray Melvin (in his first return to Stratford East since the great pioneering days of Joan Lit- tlewood 30 years ago) doubles as a tourist guide and the unseen manager of the boarding house with a wonderfully sinister performance Patrick Prior's script lacks some of the requisite terror, but this is a perfect Stratford East celebration of one of its unhappier claims to fame.

Bill Alexander's revival of The Alchemist. now at the National Theatre as a co-pro- duction with his Birmingham Rep; is just awful in every way. A desperately -unfunny and indeed desperate attempt to make an always difficult comedy workable. has led to its total destruction and a rare disaster for an admirable director.

Start with the set by William Dudley7 a weird amalgam of ancient engine-room and futurist Hollywood gothic, it requires an often sub-standard cast to clamber round its towers and battlements, thereby taking what seems like hours to cross an already too vast Olivier stage in order to deliver their next lines. As a result, they .eerr. for- ever to be out of breath and on their way to yet another clambering session for no apparent purpose other than to convey a sense of movement and activity to what is otherwise a curiously lifeless evening.

Neither Josie Lawrence as Doll Common nor Tim Pigott-Smith as Subtle seems to have yet found anything very coherent or funny in their roles, which leaves Simon Callow as the man of many accents exhaus- tively and exhaustingly trying to keep things moving along.

There is never a moment when either the director, designer or cast seems to have thought about how to get from the begin- ning of the play to the end of it in any one clear line. Some shameful mugging ensues, with the cast unsuccessfully trying to invite the audience in on any terms that will be acceptable. from the Shakespearean to the

Shavian. None of it works, and Ben ionson remains, as so often, well beyond the reach of contemporary players.

At the King's Head, Sylvia Freedman's ..4ccommodating Eva is another kind of curiosity7 a weird little farce which could he seen as a latterday politically correct ver- sion of The Man .;,7ic) Came rn Dimier In this case, the unwanted guest is in :-..aank

tric Albanian whom we first Trae,‘ t

of law presided over by a :1-)i-H,.0% narian judge (Olivier Bradley in a perfor mance of such distinction and random Shakespeare-quoting charm that one can not help wondering where he has been these last 60 years or so) who evencuallr falls in love with her.

.Dillie .Keane's wonderfully eccentric Eva soon becomes a celebrated television ehef. thereby allowing the Author to take passing satirical swipes at everything from .nouNelle cuisine to daytime programming.

The play meanders around for a couple of hours in search of a .main there !,n!: to find one and finishes up in the ::a:..-.7-notri where it started.. In. the end AccIlm,—,,clat trig Eva is not really about anything, but :Dallie Keane's manic vaudeville turn and her recipe for King Zog cabbage are Alone worth the price of admission, esen the Kings Head is not the best dinner theatre in the world to be making fun of a 17k Try eating there first, and you'll won. '7'e longing for King Zog and his cabbage