Theatre
The Fields of Ambrosia (Aldwych) Stanley (National/Cottesloe) Les Enfants du Paradis (Barbican)
Morally bankrupt
Sheridan Morley
Just suppose you have been sent a set of illustrations by a stranger. They are beauti- ful and you say so. You then discover that they have been designed by the camp com- mandant to decorate the gas chamber. That, or something very like it, happened to me this week when The Fields of Ambrosia opened at the Aldwych. A CD containing several songs from this appalling show was sent to me for review some months ago; just songs, no synopsis or book or context; and I thought them tuneful and finely crafted. We were, I thought, in Meredith Wilson country and the downhome American smalltown flavour of The Music Man was not a million miles from where this music sat on my CD player. Accordingly, ' "Stunning score" Sheridan Morley' is emblazoned not only outside the theatre but also enshrined in the advertising, as though I had seen and endorsed the show, when in fact I saw it for the first time on opening night.
For the record, the songs are tuneful, and they are now situated in a show almost comic in its moral bankruptcy. It suggests that if you are a murderess and good-look- ing and able to sing like Christine Andreas you can seduce your executioner and take him with you to . . . no, not to Hell but to some place where fairy lights and elegant white frocks and soaring strings will waft you upwards in perpetual and ecstatic sexu- al bliss. Heaven is, however, not a word I care to use for The Fields of Ambrosia.
Pam Gems, who forced us to see Piaf as more than a collection of songs and neu- roses, has now done the same for Stanley, Spencer of that ilk, the painter who mar- ried sex to Jesus Christ and came up with Bach. Something like that, anyway, these being his defining influences.
Antony Sher, looking and sounding as Spencer did, like a Cookham grocer, rather than one of the leading artists of his gener- ation, redefines himself as an actor with this finely detailed portrayal of an ego so out of control that he believed himself to be entitled to the undivided attention of any woman he wanted. As it happened, he wanted his clever, saintly wife Hilda, explaining impatiently that he needed the time she gave to their children for himself as much as he needed to give their house to the odious upperclass Patricia, so that she would live with him. Anna Chancellor's glacial Patricia is an amoral, extravagant childwoman who insists on sharing her life, even honeymooning, with Dorothy, her `longtime companion', sensitively limned by Selina Cadell in an unsensational but bril- liant performance.
Pam Gems' gem of a play and John Caird's painterly production make Stanley endlessly fascinating. Caird and his design- er, Tim Hatley, have hung and lit reproduc- tions of Spencer's paintings all over the Cottesloe so that we don't forget the con- flations of sacred and profane that inform all of Stanley's self-justificatory speeches, perorations of such ego-ridden carelessness that the laughter they generate has a kind of gobsmacked admiration.
Caird has assembled a cast of rare quali- ty with Deborah Findlay's Hilda a haunting testament to earth-mothering without a cause, and Anna Chancellor gives Patricia just the right combination of hauteur and girlishness while Antony Sher's peerless Spencer peers at his shambolic domestic situation through owl-like glasses and never stops talking, but Stanley belongs to the women. Serves him right.
When an actor on a nearly deserted stage says to another, 'Let's get out of this terrible crowd,' you know you are about to be asked to suspend disbelief on a grand scale. Simon Callow has rashly adapted and directed the classic 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis in an all too faithful homage to its director, Marcel Came. Having made a massive commitment to embark on this almost suicidally difficult project, Callow then turns out not to have much to say about it, although his adaptation lasts an hour longer than the film. But films are not plays. Where on film Paris teems with char- acters, sounds, even colours (yes, yes, I know the film's in black and white), with life itself, the play is underpowered, under- cast and underpopulated.
The most romantic of movies, Les Enfants du Paradis is a backstage saga of Garance, a woman loved by four men. There's Frederick, an actor who woos her with words, Lacenaire, the gangster who woos her with excitement, the Count de Monteray who woos her with money, and Baptiste, the gentle mime who woos her with the purity of his love. Helen McCrory lacks the enigmatic quality for a Garance, and though Joseph Fiennes is appropriately slimy as Lacenaire, the others just won't do. It's not their fault or Callow's, just that the original cast — Arletty as Garance, Jean-Louis Barrault as Baptiste — have over the years become inextricably identi- fied with these roles. The RSC never stood a chance.
`Look if you're not sure, why not throw yourself against the windscreen and see how it feels.'
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