Theatre
Smelling a Rat (Hampstead)
Cupboard lovers
Christopher Edwards
his is the latest in a line of plays devised by Mike Leigh in collaboration with a cast. The actors are given the outlines of characters and they try to bring them and a dramatic situation to life through rehearsal and 'field research'. Popular successes among Mike Leigh's plays have included Abigail's Party (1977) and Goose Pimples (1981). Taking those two pieces as benchmarks, I would rank Smelling a Rat level with the sporadically enjoyable Goose Pimples but well below the acutely funny Abigail's Party.
The very limitations of this sort of theatre contain its characteristic strengths, and Mike Leigh is a highly talented exploi- ter of those strengths. In most plays, the production follows the text and does its best to enact it. Here something like the reverse procedure takes place, for the dialogue is put together as character and circumstance seem to require. So, without the usual controlling authorial voice actors build up closely observed, narrow identi- ties. The people they inhabit are invariably 'A kiss will do wonders for your image as a real princess.' moronic, traumatised or inarticulate — often all three. The funniest, tenderest moments are usually the kind which no playwright would compose on paper, for instance this piece's painfully protracted adolescent seduction between Greg Crutt- well's Rock and Saskia Reeves's Melanie- Jane. The conflicting poles of desire and disgust — brilliantly caught — are built up in scurrying evasions and desperate embraces. The little that is actually said is the last and crowning touch.
The action takes place in Eve Stewart's gloriously tasteless green and pink bed- room set, on Christmas Day. Dominated by a huge bed covered in fluffy toys, this is the tacky heart of millionaire Rex Weasel's pest control empire. Rex (Eric Allan) arrives back inexplicably early from a holiday with his wife in Lanzarote. Sport- ing a tartan golf cap and moving jerkily like some rodent himself, Rex possesses a spiky, cartoon-like definition. On our first encounter he actually says nothing, for hearing someone at the front door he retires with an air-gun into a cupboard. Enter Vic (Timothy Spall) and his wife Charmaine (Brid Brennan). The gross, duffel-coated, loquacious Vic works for Rex and has come round to keep an eye on the place. Soon, in the best farce tradition, Vic and Charmaine too take to the cup- boards upon hearing Rock, Rex's catatonic son, and Melanie-Jane, his lisping infantile girlfriend, coming in. Apart from the already mentioned seduction (never com- pleted), home truths are uttered and over- heard before cupboard doors open and their occupants spill out.
But unlike farce there is no real panic, for there are no real secrets to hide. The cupboards hold no skeletons. Instead, a quintet of strikingly contrasted characters, all emotionally stunted in one way or another, vividly enact themselves. You can discern certain themes all right, but the pleasure (only intermittent here) lies in the accurate behavioural observations of cast and director. Rex is clearly and rather creepily brutish. Rock, his son, has been traumatised by family life and you have a sharp sense of the kind of person he will forever remain. The touchingly infantile Melanie-Jane, too, has suffered at her parents' hands. So through all Melanie- Jane's breathy non-sequiturs the agonised encounter in the parental sanctum is brushed with Oedipal connotations. As for Vic and Charmaine, they are stuck in a fleshly, sniggering groove from which not even Vic's abstruse, jumbled eloquence (every sentence contains an 'inasmuch') can shift them. The acting is uniformly excellent and there are times when the slow spinning out of painful banalities generates hysterical recognition in the au- dience. What the production lacks is the variety and humour required to fill up the all too frequent longueurs that remain.
Hilary Mantel is unwell.
Previous page
