Theatre
School for Wives (Almeida) Cabaret (Donmar Warehouse) Jane Eyre (Playhouse)
Magnificent Molfere
Sheridan Morley
We may have had to wait until the very last moment for the comedy and the comic performance of the year, but at the Almeida we surely now have them: Jonathan Kent's brilliantly witty 90-minute staging of Moliere's School for Wives offers Ian McDiarmid flapping around the stage like a mad goldfish on speed, dragging back a wondrous farce from library to live Performance. Kent has dressed up the old Richard Wilbur verse translation with a production in which actual rain falls on to the town house where Arnolphe is keeping his child bride locked away from her lover. The farcical twists and double-twists of Moliere's best-constructed plot are coun- terpointed with a still-topical debate about the purposes of women and marriage in a male-chauvinist society, and it is the tri- umph of this revival that it feels the urge neither to mock nor to update nor to realign the original, but simply to restore it to all its long-lost Parisian intellectual glory.
A mix of Malvolio and Mephistopheles, McDiarmid's frustrated would-be husband and gaoler is a gigantic comic and ultimate- ly tragic creation, coolly offset by Emma Fielding's chilly Agnes and Damian Lewis's stud-like Horace. But all the playing here, including that of Linal Haft and Carol Macready as the mad servants and Bernard Gallagher as the only sane figure to figure in Arnolphe's manic scenario, is a tribute to the Almeida's talent for crafting instant company spirit among actors who appear to have been playing together for years. We are unlikely ever to see a better staging: Kent puts a timeless spin on a vintage com- edy of appalling manners, and you can't ask a lot more than that.
What good is sitting alone in your room? Come to the Cabaret, old chum. Kander and Ebb's classic 1966 musical has always had a curious heritage (Isherwood as Herr Issyvoo by way of John van Druten's I Am a Camera and the Brecht-Weill presence of Lotte Lenya in the original Broadway cast, transposed to a Liza Minnelli/Hollywood vehicle which had precious little to do with the original Berlin), but it will never find a better home than amid the night-club tables of the Donmar Warehouse.
Sam Mendes's breathtaking new staging abandons the Hal Prince big-band concept for an intimate close-up, no longer Sweet Charity with swastikas but instead a plausi- bly grimy night-club where Jane Horrocks (the best Sally Bowles since Judi Dench) belts out the numbers that link Isherwood's sketchy tale. In a stunning cast, Sara Kestelman as the Mother Courage land- lady, George Raistrick as her all-too-Jewish suitor, Adam Godley as the gay English novelist and, above all, Alan Cumming as the epicene Master of Ceremonies all prove that this is a company show, never better than in the final line-up when each of them echoes the political, social and sex- ual themes that have survived the hurly- burly of the Kit Kat Club.
The score here is an amalgam of num- bers from Broadway, Hollywood and road- show Cabaret, and Horrocks claws it back from Minnelli with a gritty Home Counties resilience. Cumming as puppet-master host never leaves the stage, and though we have lost the original Lenya link, the show has retained all its Berlin power, never more so than in the title song which Horrocks makes an angry anthem to her own sur- vival; in the last seconds, Mendes pulls a final stunt with the MC which even Hal Prince never thought of, and it makes a chilly, logical sense of the whole show. Go see it again for yourself.
It is the curious achievement of Fay Wel- don, as adapter, and Helena Kaut-Howson, as director, to have given us at the Play- house a Jane Eyre which puts that novel firmly in the class of Rebecca and The Secret Garden. For those who like their Brontës on stage, here they all are: Char- lotte, Anne, Emily and Branwell hover around the central action, indulging them- selves in minor roles and a little light scene-shifting, while centre stage Tim Pigott-Smith goes memorably over the top as Rochester and Alexandra Mathie drifts wanly around in the title role.
If what you want is a. three-hour synopsis of the book, all highlights adequately con- veyed with just enough post-modernist feminist updating (largely conveyed by rag- dolls left around the stage and some dolls'- houses bursting spectacularly into flames) then this is the Jane Eyre for you: rather like one of those talking books on cassette, it gets you painlessly through a digest of the original without ever expecting you to have to think about it too deeply. Bill Ken- wright, the manager, is commendably offer- ing all seats at £10 each, and if anything can break the jinx of the Playhouse, at least for the Christmas season, then this is it.
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