Coward tribute
Lloyd Evans
Brief Encounter The Cinema Haymarket The Homecoming Almeida Under the Eagle White Bear
Bit of a spoiled brat, the Cinema Haymarket. Can’t decide what it wants. Originally built as a theatre, it defected to the movies for many years but having tired of hosting popcorn blockbusters it’s now receiving plays again. Lovely auditorium, though. Wide comfy seats arranged with such a steep rake that you can see perfectly even if the chap in front of you is Lennox Lewis in a top hat. This new phase of its life begins with an update of Brief Encounter. Like the venue, the show isn’t certain quite what it wants to be. The classic storyline is supplemented with heaps of visual effects, snatches of musichall pastiche and enough Noël Coward songs to qualify as a tribute show. Pick’n’mix approach. Hit’n’miss result.
Director Emma Rice certainly sweats her actors. They dance, sing, mime, play music and occasionally dangle from ropes while pretending to be unconscious. Alec is played by Tristan Sturrock (a handsome, chiselled actor about as tall as a parking meter), who faithfully reproduces the prosaic elegance of the period. And Naomi Frederick’s Laura is stylishly demure. But neither can hope to rival Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. I began to think of hyenas pawing at the scraps left by lions. Tamzin Griffin, perhaps wondering why she hadn’t landed the role of Laura, does a superb comic turn as the matron of the station tea-room. Her upwardly mobile cockney vowels are ridiculously elongated. ‘Cake or pastry’ comes out as ‘key ache or peer stray’. Besides the central action there are marginal characters whose romantic entanglements imitate, and demonstrate by contrast, the quiet and heroic grandeur of Alec and Laura’s affair. But these sideshow trysts get quite annoying and the production struggles to harmonise its myriad different registers.
Music, comedy, acrobatics, tragedy, romance, burlesque and straight drama are plenty, never mind the filmed inserts which are laughably banal. Crashing seas to symbolise sexual desire is as inspiring as a coffin on a Get Well Soon card. And yet somehow the lustrous and magical core of Coward’s script shines through. The final moment, when Alec says goodbye forever by touching Laura’s shoulder for a fleeting second, is as gut-tugging as the movie itself. At the Almeida, Michael Attenborough has produced a rock-solid version of one of Pinter’s weirdest pieces of inspiration, The Homecoming. Excellent performances. Kenneth Cranham raging impotently as Max the cuckolded dad is as ugly as he is enthralling. Nigel Lindsay’s kindly pudding of a face acquires the babyish cast of real villainy as Len the charismatic psycho. And there’s a titanic stillness about Jenny Jules’s Ruth. Her beauty has a monumental and unearthly quality which seems just right for this fairytale character who transforms herself in the space of a few hours from homemaking mum to spread-eagled slut. Never having seen this play before I have to be blunt — it’s stark raving bonkers. There’s no reason for Teddy to hand over his wife to his ghastly coven of brothers. And Ruth herself has even less cause to abandon her children and a comfortable university life in order to whore herself out for a bunch of cockney thugs. Intellectuals will tell you the script is a searching analysis of the secret kinship between prostitution and marriage. Me, I take the same view as the author and look at it with a bemused shrug as if it were an avalanche or a car crash. It just happened. Explanations irrelevant.
Under the Eagle is set at Chequers during a summit between a silky smooth British prime minister and a prickly blonde US president. The plot could do with some ironing out. The Brits are refusing to release a UK citizen kidnapped by the Americans but temporarily held at a British airport. Negotiating his release, the PM asks the president to prevent right-wing American preachers from teaching creationism to British schoolkids. Don’t quite get that. And for some reason an angry standup has been kidnapped by MI5 and forced to attend the summit supper. Wouldn’t an invite have done? Plot aside, the script has lots of merriment. ‘How are the kids?’ the PM asks the President. ‘Shooting up,’ she says. ‘Sorry to hear that. Are they getting help?’ Director Conrad Blakemore coaxes fine performances from the ensemble, and Jonathan Rigby, as the PM’s wry, knowing deputy, is outstanding. Whenever he’s on stage a special electricity crackles through the theatre. This is an interesting, funny and slightly flawed political satire. But Rigby is faultless. The man’s a star.
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