Theatre
Lakeboat (Lyric Hammersmith Studio) Blue Window (Old Red Lion) Sabina (Bush)
Conversation piece
Sheridan Morley
bound the London fringe, an unusu- ally strong week for the local premieres of long-lost first plays by now-distinguished American dramatists. At the Lyric Ham- mersmith Studio, Lakeboat was written by David Mamet when, back in the late 1960s, he was a college student and spending one summer vacation working on the boats which then still carried steel and even mail across the Great Lakes out of South Chica- go to Duluth.
Amazingly secure for a first script, this is a wry and wonderfully observant look at eight men flung together on an ancient craft, not drowning but frantically waving at each other in the hope of making some kind of shipboard contact.
Like another great American dramatist, Eugene O'Neill, who also set his early plays on the boats he then knew best, Mamet finds in his crew a whole series of richly detailed character portraits, and already, some six years before American Buffalo, it is clear that he was fast developing his own unique brand of quickfire, cross-purpose dialogue, the kind that comes at you as out of a machine-gun.
There's no real plot here, just eight men in conversations and monologues trying to make some hesitant kind of sense out of their lost opportunities, friendships and in some cases lives. Through their spare, sparse chatter we get a real sense of the two officers, five seamen and the uneasy but fas- cinated college boy who is clearly Mamet himself. All of them, in Marlon Brando's famous phrase, could have been contenders but by now they have forgotten quite what the contest was, or just how they were sup- posed to go about winning it. These men are every bit as wasted as the salesmen of Glengarry Glen Ross, only here there is no real competition, just a bleak sense of loss. Mired in drink and regret, they talk to themselves and us like the ancient mariners they are, and in Aaron Mullen's wondrous production Brian Greene as the Captain, and Jim Dunk as the only one of his crew with any kind of a soul, lead a strong cast across Melanie Allen's superb recreation of the decks and galley.
Lakeboat is not only interesting and important for what it shows us of the way Mamet was headed, it is also a crackingly dramatic and observant piece which would have been well worth staging even if Mamet had never written another script.
Up at the Old Red Lion in Islington, we also now have the European premiere of Blue Window by Craig Lucas, who, consid- ering he wrote such award-winning movies as Reckless and Longtime Companion and Prelude to a Kiss, ought to be rather better- known over here than in fact he is. This is a play written 12 years ago about the Man- hattan cocktail party from hell, and it is in many ways side by side without Sondheim; Lucas was his collaborator on Many Me a Little and he remains so close to the high- rise urban angst of Sondheim's Manhattan that Blue Window often just seems to be Company without the songs.
True, there is only one number here (written by neither Lucas nor Sondheim), but all around it is an 80-minute conversa- tional battlefield in which six ill-assorted guests and their hostess explore the border- line that separates manic ego-trip from out- and-out nervous breakdown. We get the usual assortment of New York neurotics, from the hostess who has lost a tooth to the lesbian couple in trouble and the would-be songwriter, but the problem now is that both Woody Allen and Sondheim himself have covered this territory so comprehen- sively that all we are really left with is a series of semi-animated New Yorker car- toons just past their copy date. Urban chic turning into unruly chaos just on the verge of the Aids crisis is bound to look a little dated over a decade later, and although Joe Harmston does his agile best to cross- cut these unfulfilled lives on a tiny stage, the truth is that by and large he has failed to attract players with enough talent or charisma to make us care about their end- less self-absorption. As a result, seven char- acters are left in search of an author, or at least some semblance of a plot. Unless, of course, you count the unseen unfortunate who fell off a high-rise balcony only to be crushed to death by his girlfriend on the sidewalk below; somehow I wanted to know more about that, and less about the rest of a rambling conversation piece ulti- mately unable to stay stuck together even for as short an attention span as that of a one-act play.
And finally, at the Bush, Snoo Wilson's Sabina is a brave but ultimately cack-hand- ed attempt to invade the territory of Terry Johnson's Hysteria or even Tom Stoppard's Travesties. As in the first of these we have Freud as a central character, and as in the second we are in Zurich around the time of the first world war. But there, alas, all resemblance ends; whereas Stoppard and Johnson wrote brilliant psychological comedies about the meeting of unlikely philosophic minds, Wilson comes up with a manic kind of strip-cartoon in which Freud, Jung and their assorted womenfolk play out a bedroom farce of truly stunning inad- equacy. The disappointment here is consid- erable, because never for a moment can we care about the Jung ones or their appalling inability to make sense of their own lives, even while offering unsound psychological advice to others.
At the heart of Andy Wilson's under- standably confused and increasingly des- perate production there seems to have once been a very good story; that of the title character, Sabina herself, who, having apparently driven both Jung and Freud to distraction on and off both bed and couch, finished up in charge of a Russian orphan- age before being killed by retreating Ger- mans in the second world war. There must be a mini-series in there somewhere, but Wilson has instead chosen to tell only the first half of her amazing adventures and even then in so deeply inchoate and mud- dled a fashion that we are left with random ramblings around the birth of psychoanaly- sis without any kind of focus or central energy. Paul McGann as Jung and Susan Vidler in the title role both manage to sug- gest from time to time that something coherent might be about to happen, but the rest of the cast end up totally defeated, and you'll learn a lot more from Wilson's highly informative and erudite programme note about the early years of psychoanalysis and the Jung-Freud rivalry than you ever will from the play he has so signally failed to build around them.
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