Theatre
Shopping and Fucking (Royal Court Upstairs/Ambassadors) Laughter on the 23rd Floor (Queens) Cash on Delivery (Whitehall)
Something nasty in the basement
Sheridan Morley
Downstairs at the Ambassadors, or whatever the Royal Court is now calling the theatre they have taken over for a short time while the builders take over Sloane Square, Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking is at times as sensationally shock- ing as the title which is still giving typeset- ters and broadcasters headaches all over London.
Like a South of England Trainspotting, this brutal, brusque, briskly disturbing play offers simulated male buggery and assorted other full-frontal attacks on the susceptibil- ities of an audience who might be alerted by the late (9.30) start-time to expect the equivalent of a double-X movie; alterna- tively the late curtain might just be to spare theatre-goers upstairs at Pinter's infinitely greater and more disturbing Ashes to Ashes the subterranean sounds of something very nasty happening in the basement.
But unlike Sarah Kane (author of last year's Court shocker Blasted) Mark Raven- hill has a curiously poetic ability to pin- point the language and despair of junkie drifters, so that even when one of them quotes out of context the closing speech of Uncle Vanya it becomes unbearably touch- ing instead of farcically over the top or out of place.
In Max Stafford-Clark's grainy produc- tion for Out of Joint, Robin Soans does his usual suave villain as the drug dealer and the otherwise young and untried cast achieve a terrible kind of Ecstasy-induced alienation: Ravenhill is a writer to watch, if only from behind eyes half closed at the nightmares he stages.
Jean Anouilh's plays were famously divided into pieces roses' and `pieces noires' and I guess the same could go for Neil Simon's. The darker plays have usually been the most closely autobiographical, but Laughter on the 23rd Floor intriguingly straddles the borderline where the farces meet the facts.
Seen originally on Broadway four years ago (where it was only a so-so success) this is the one about Simon's early years as a
comedy scriptwriter on American televi- sion's weekly Your Show of Shows. Back in 1953, Simon briefly shared an office with the equally young Woody Allen, Larry Gel- bart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and his own brother Danny, who to this day gives col- lege seminars in the art of comedy-writing for the screen. All of them had been assembled by the one who was then by far the greatest star and yet is now almost totally forgotten — Sid Caesar, the 'Max Prince' of this play.
As played now by Gene Wilder, himself of course a graduate of the later Mel Brooks academy, Prince is a strange, manic loner, forever ramming his fist through plasterboard office walls in frustration at what NBC are trying to do to his show and himself.
So Laughter on the 23rd Floor is at once a celebration of Prince and a lament for his downfall; the problem for British audiences lies in trying to assess how much of a loss Sid Caesar really was to prime-time Ameri- can television, and here I have my own dif- ficulties. I was a child of about seven in New York at the time of Caesar's prime and he always struck me even then as deeply unfunny, especially at 90 unedited minutes a week. So one begins to under- stand NBC's desire to get the show if not off the air then at least into some reason- ably shorter time-frame, and, once you accept that, there is really no drama here, just an affectionate scrapbook of Simon's earliest professional memories of being allowed to giggle with the big boys.
But there is now this wonderful perfor- mance from Gene Wilder, a strange, intro- vert, fascinating actor who roams around the stage in his own private world, only occasionally emerging to bewilder his disci- ples or inspire them with his own deeply eccentric neuroses. This is a truly great comic turn which makes those of a hard- working local company grouped respectful- ly around him look just like a lot of acting where Wilder does a lot of inspired living. Unlike the comic he plays, Wilder is in fact hugely disciplined on the set and therefore a great deal more hilarious, because every loony thing he says and does comes from a deep interior logic which makes it absolute- ly normal once you accept the bizarre mechanisms of his own thought-process.
By an unlucky coincidence, Simon's thoughtful and rueful farce arrives in the West End in the same week as Cash on Delivery, Ray Cooney's Whitehall produc- tion of his son Michael's first script. Though this is in his father's best farce- over-elbow tradition, it is more mechanical than mirthful and suffers from a tremen- dous casting problem. Somewhere about halfway down the cast list are such classic and veteran farceurs as Frank Thornton and Bryan Murphy, but the leading roles go to television sitcom stars who would not know their Ben Travers from their Vernon Sylvaine.
The tradition of great British farce going back to the Aldwych company of the 1920s and then moving forward through Brian Rix to Cooney, has always depended on a team of lightning-quick comedians knowing the genre as intimately as members of the RSC once knew their Shakespeare. Unfortunately, we no longer breed such people, nor outside the Whitehall is there any real work for them: the legacy of Robertson Hare and Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn effectively stops at Thornton and Murphy in comparatively minor roles, while the principals chase each other around the set wondering how on earth plays like this were ever made to stand up at more than the now-requisite 30 televi- sion minutes. Cooney senior directs expert- ly; Cooney junior has just followed the farce rule-book without breathing any new life into what is, I fear, a near-death experi- ence involving the usual mistaken-identity corpse and a benefit fraud which escalates into frenzied chaos.
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