Theatre
Nabokov's Gloves (Hampstead) Sweet Charity (Victoria Palace)
The Betrayal of Nora Blake (Jermyn Street Theatre)
Much ado about nothing
Sheridan Morley
The title of Peter Moffat's already award-winning new play at Hampstead, Nabokov's Gloves, needs a little explaining; it appears, though this is only very tenuous- ly covered by the play itself, that the Lolita novelist was also an eager butterfly-collec- tor who took the usual precaution of cover- ing his hands before dealing with his favourite creatures. We are perhaps meant to understand from this that people as well as butterflies are fragile but interesting if examined under microscopic conditions. Certainly the lawyers gathered around the table in Moffat's play are shaky enough in their own skins, and it is significant that before its current stage premiere, the play's award should have come from a television company for new writing.
Because Nabokov's Gloves resembles nothing more closely than one of those television drama pilots where you get rapidly introduced to a gang of neighbours or doctors or, in this case, lawyers whose lives and problems we are then to follow individually in the weeks ahead. Except, of course, with a stage play there are no weeks ahead, so Moffat has to race through half-a-dozen case histories within a brisk couple of hours. Thus we get to meet Nick (a dour Greg Wise) who, despite being married to a winningly winsome doctor (Niamh Cusack), falls catastrophically in love with one of his clients, a dour heroin addict and dealer who may just possibly also have been caught up in parental mur- der.
As if that weren't enough, we also get the wise older clerk of the chambers (David Cardy, memorably complaining at dinner that his gazpacho is cold) and Beatie Edney as Darling, yet another career lawyer turned so cynical that you wonder why the meal she is forever cooking hasn't curdled in her own despair. True, she has a wonderful recipe which involves stuffing a chicken with an empty beer can refilled with white wine, a truly stomach-churning sight, but beyond that Moffat seems fatally undecided whether he is writing a court- room thriller, an attack on the cynical and self-serving evasions of the legal profes- sion, or a loving account of some truly wounded souls clinging to each other for comfort outside the Inns of Court.
As an ex-lawyer himself, Moffat seems to be telling us in the end that, if we are in any kind of trouble, the last people we need to add to it are members of the legal profession, and, although Ian Brown the director does what he can to tie up all the loose ends, there are rather too many of them left over here.
In a summer already alive with the sound of old musicals, Sweet Charity, the greatest of all Cy Coleman's Broadway hits, comes back to us at the Victoria Palace looking all of its 30 years and then some. Quite why this show should have dated so badly when, for instance, Show Boat from 40 years earli- er comes up now looking as fresh as the night it first opened, is a mystery that may have something to do with the original Fellini movie on which Neil Simon based yet another collection of 1960s one-liners.
There is nothing much wrong with this revival which couldn't be solved by the injection of several million pounds and an almost entirely new cast; the difficulty is that the show is already surrounded with the ghosts of such one-time Broadway greats as Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Juliet Prowse and, on film, Shirley MacLaine and Sammy Davis Jr. Theirs are almost impos- sible memories to beat, and though Bonnie Langford has at last thrown off her Shirley Temple problems to become an infinitely Help me out, Giles — I always get 'mixed media' and 'multimedia' confused.' hardworking, endearing, talented and feisty Charity, every other expense on the show has been spared with the result that the rest of the company seem not so much undercast as barely cast at all.
In an infinitely tacky production which looks as if it has been on the road for sev- eral years instead of a few weeks, a crucial lesson has never been understood: Sweet Charity may be set in and around a tawdry nightclub, but it needs to look like a million dollars. Here everything from the scenery through the choreography to the lighting and even the sound-system looks and sounds not so much secondhand as returned from the pawnshop unsold. This is definitely amateur night, with only Langford and Mark Wynter as the Mastroianni-like lover giving anything more than barely adequate performances; everything that should here be brisk and glib and cynical is slow and tired and as worn out already as the girls in search of their 'Big Spender'. As for the 'Rhythm of Life', it seems to have been halted alto- gether; a once-great show-stopper now sig- nally fails to stop a show which has already lain down and died of its own inertia and underfunding somewhere on the long road from Bromley, which is where it opened and should have closed.
Much better news, however, at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre where John Meyer's The Betrayal of Nora Blake is a wonderful addition to that long tradition of (usuallY off-Broadway) musical mockeries, shows like Dames at Sea and Little Mary Sunshine which managed simultaneously to celebrate and cynically parody certain genres of old Hollywood movies. This time we are in the 1946 world of Lana Turner and Barbara Stanwyck movies about mysterious but magnificently glam- orous women caught up in murder plots of incredible complexity often involving twin sisters, sinister psychiatrists, dream sequences and nightmare realities. AS author, composer and lyricist, Meyer has come up with a masterly parody of all that and Chore, a score which harks back to Miklos Rosza and Franz Waxman, while the actor Nickolas Grace has directed all amazingly nimble production making the best use I have ever seen of the cramped Jermyn Street stage. As the sisters, Claire Moore (the good) and Issy Van Randwyck (the bad) are also just wonderful, while around them Michael Mateus and Andrew Wadsworth and John Levitt and Ann Wakefield make up an equally agile cast, all of whom must have spent hours watching cable or satellite mid- night reruns of all the movies of this very precise post-war time in order to come oP with such deadly accurate and wickedly mocking performances. This show clearly has a strong future off-Broadway; but hav- ing opened over here first for a change, I just hope it stays around London long enough to catch the rest of us old movie freaks.
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