Theatre
House/Garden (National Theatre) The Graduate (Gielgud)
Misbegotten misfits
Sheridan Morley
Amost 40 years ago, Tom Stoppard first made his name as a dramatist by won- dering what happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern when they weren't actually on stage in Hamlet. On two of the National Theatre stages, Alan Ayckbourn now goes one further, though not altogether one bet- ter, by giving us all the on-stage and the off-stage action of his House/Garden across a six-hour day, complete with foyer fête to end it all. The result in Stoppardian terms would be like having to watch all of Hamlet and then all of Rosencrantz and Guilden- stem Are Dead with only a short tea interval.
What happens in the end here, as so often in Ayckboum, is that the stage engi- neer overtakes and severely damages the playwriting genius. House alone is in many ways one of his best plays, a brilliant retread of all those country-house-party comedies of the 1950s by Hugh Williams or William Douglas Home in which we still get the stock characters of the comic cook and the silly-ass husband and the long-suf- fering wife, except that now of course they are rewritten in blood and sweat and tears, for there are precious few happy endings in Ayckboum these days.
`Sooner or later,' as someone says early in House, 'life pays you back,' and across the rest of this play Ayckbourn shows us, hilariously and tragically, precisely how the paybacks are to be arranged. The trouble starts when we get to the second play, Gar- den, which involves the same characters when they are not actually indoors playing the House. In the first place, by the time we get to the end of House there really isn't a lot left to say about any of them; we kind of know, from the troubles they encounter indoors, the nature of their likely troubles outdoors.
The greater problem is that Garden has to accommodate House, to the extent that not even Ayckbourn characters can be on two stages at once; so despite the brilliance of the stage-management here, there remain some ugly pauses in the actual writing where Ayckbourn himself, as author and director, is clearly having to play for time. A charac- ter we urgently need to see in Garden can't appear at precisely the right moment because he or she is needed indoors, so some other character (usually the unlucky Sian Thomas) is left hanging out to dry, with neither enough to say or do until we can lurch forward to the next entrance.
But there are some great moments here, and some equally great performances: David Haig as the bemused, chronically unfaithful husband; Jane Asher as his glacial wife; Michael Siberry as the genially cuckolded local doctor, and above all Mal- colm Sinclair as a wonderfully sinister Downing Street power-broker with an unlucky predilection for very young girls in school costumes; not to mention Zabou Breitman as a barking-mad French film star bearing a remarkable resemblance to Jane Birkin. All manage to create another gallery Just firming up my pecks.' of Sir Alan's misbegotten misfits, each and every one of them trying to get a life where there seems to be nothing but living death.
In the end there are rather more than two plays fighting for our attention here, and some wondrous comic notions. But `less is more' is not a phrase that hangs any- where near Ayckboum's Scarborough work- shops, and in his curious belief that five plays are better than one, even within the same production, some very good ideas and even one or two very good characters are getting lost, or at least underdeveloped, in this needlessly complex, albeit intermittent- ly hilarious, escapade.
Here's to precisely who, Mrs Robinson? Can we establish at the outset, beyond the hype and the features and the flashguns and the amazing stage-door crowds, just what is going on at the Gielgud Theatre? A middle-aged former fashion model, in admittedly a remarkably good state of repair and upkeep, who was once married to a rock star, has taken over the leading role in a six-month-old West End comedy based on a 30-year-old Hollywood movie called The Graduate.
It is not that Jerry Hall is actually bad as Mrs Robinson; true, she's not as good as Kathleen Turner who originated the role of the predatory sex-starved mother on stage, but then again Turner wasn't really as good as Anne Bancroft in the original movie, and nobody has ever been as good in the title role as Dustin Hoffman back in the late 1960s.
Jerry Hall does seem to have slowed the show down, however, and she has a curious habit of draping herself around the minimal set rather vacantly, as if awaiting a photog- rapher to line her up for the next shot. But she is no worse than she was in Bus Stop a decade ago, and I don't recall then the obsessive fascination which now seems to surround this rather undistinguished takeover; indeed she seemed rather happier and sparkier in the earlier role.
It must then be because this time she takes off all her clothes, albeit only for about 30 seconds and then in a tactful kind of stage twilight. But even now, some poor hack out there is still trying to find a way of getting Jerry and Viagra into the same headline, where the truth is that she is oddly unarousing in the role.
Clearly she has considerable sex appeal, but it is the appeal of one of those Hitch- cock ice maidens; what she lacks is any kind of stage energy, and without that Terry Johnson's brilliant adaptation of the old movie now lacks a certain zest.
Of the other newcomers, both Josh Cohen in the title role and Lucy Punch as the daughter for whom he abandons the mother are charming enough, but this is no longer really a play at all. It has become a spectacle, rather like Madame Tussaud's or The Mousetrap or the Tower of London, and doubtless it will soon be starring Edna Everage, or alternate members of the Spice Girls and the Beverley Sisters.
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