Theatre
Elvis (Prince of Wales) The Taming of the Shrew (Barbican)
Some Sunny Day (Hampstead)
A tawdry singalong
Sheridan Morley
Athe Prince of Wales, Elvis The Musical is helpfully so titled, presumably to avoid confusion with Elvis The Amazing Self-Exploding Cheeseburger. The show has been around in one form or another for about the last 20 years, but this time had to be delayed a couple of weeks until the heavy mob from Graceland could give it their undivided attention.
Unfortunately, undivided attention is what you can't give this tawdry singalong: a book credited to two authors seems to have entirely disappeared in rehearsal, so we are left with a sort of guitar festival. Three singers play Elvis at various ages, but of Colonel Parker there is not a trace, and an all-white cast find themselves unable even to acknowledge, as Elvis him- self always did, the huge debt his music owed to black rhythm and blues.
At the back of the set, presumably for those of us who can't bear to watch what is happening at the front of it, someone has devised a fascinating collection of old news material: Presley's birth is thus marked by guest-star appearances from Adolph Hitler and King George V, neither of whom ever had to listen to him, while those who still believe that Elvis is alive and well and liv- ing on the Isle of Wight with Eva Peron will doubtless be reassured by this squeaky-clean memorial. But this is all peripheral, as is the show itself; as they used to announce over the loudspeakers in Las Vegas in order to clear the hall, Mr Presley has left the building.
Of all Shakespeare's 30-something plays, the two most difficult to revive in an age of political correctness are undoubtedly The Merchant of Venice, with its considerable anti-Semitism, and The Taming of the Shrew, with its inevitable male chauvinism. In the Gale Edwards production of the Shrew, newly into the Barbican to open what will in fact be the RSC's last summer there before pulling back to Stratford and the road, both she and her star Josie Lawrence have a considerable triumph. Miss Lawrence indeed, still best known for a series of television improvisations and alternative comedy, makes the most pow- erful and confident Shakespearean debut in a star role that I can ever recall.
As for her director, Edwards overcomes the sexist agony of Kate's last enforced submission to Petruchio (Michael Siberry in 1920 matinee-idol form) by framing the whole play within the usually cut dream of Christopher Sly, a prologue and epilogue used here to offset the unpleasant after- taste of Kate's apparent defeat. The rest of the cast seem to think they are in Kiss Me Kate without the songs, but in seeing the whole show as a dream, so that Petruchio awakes to find he has married his Shrew and she has remained just that, this pro- duction radically shifts the viewpoint to suit a 1990s perspective. Some of the farce is admittedly overplayed, but the dinner scene is a masterpiece of Keystone Cops agility, and, unlike most attempts to bring Shakespeare into line with modern preju- dice, it works like the dream now at its centre.
I wish I could be as enthusiastic as most of my colleagues about Martin Sherman's Some Sunny Day at Hampstead. The set- ting is wartime Cairo, the Germans are at the gates, and at first we seem to be in for another kind of Casablanca wherein we have to sort out the traitors from the good guys; but what Sherman gives us is five occupants of some kind of boarding house. There's Robin, a New Zealand journalist — a wonderfully camp and languid Rupert Everett, at any rate until it transpires that he is from outer space and has brought his own landing craft. Alec, his lover, is a British officer and gentleman with appar- ent delusions of being T.E. Lawrence; then there's a splendidly lugubrious middle- aged English diplomat (Corin Redgrave in fine, absent-minded form) describing to his ill wife the wonders of his affair with a belly-dancer. There's also a Grand Duchess trying for a pass on the midnight train to Palestine (Sarah Kestelman) and Cheryl Campbell as the murder victim.
Sometimes, in an obscure tribute to Dali and Uri Geller, clocks whirr backwards, guns bend and the cutlery takes on odd shapes; but by about the end of the first half Sherman has fallen so in love with his weird array of houseguests that he has lost all interest in giving them a coherent plot. The director Roger Michell gamely tries to fmd a path through the resulting chaos, fails and leaves us with several loonies in search of a plot: by act two, when anything can happen, nothing really does.
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