Theatre
The Importance of Being Earnest (Aldwych)
Squirrels (King's Head) Invade My Privacy (Riverside Studios)
The importance of being Maggie
Sheridan Morley
In a time of considerable commercial peril around the West End, managements are playing safe: a couple of major Wilde revivals, a couple of equally major Ratti- gans, a couple of Agatha Christies, and if you look a little harder you'll find Graham Greene and George Gershwin and Cyrano de Bergerac. Put a time-traveller down in Shaftesbury Avenue tomorrow and he'd be wise to guess the date at sometime in 1954.
The management at the Aldwych are playing it safer still: having landed the catch of the season, Maggie Smith as Lady Bracknell, they've surrounded her with her last Lettice & Lovage cast (Margaret Tyzack and Richard Pearson), plus the National's hottest director (Nicholas Hytner), plus a chic young movie star from Dracula and The Player (Richard E. Grant), and the best thing to have emerged from Jonathan Miller's Old Vic (Alex Jennings). The result ought to be an unqualified triumph instead of a mixed blessing, but it's not.
True, Dame Maggie is stupendous: her Bracknell is the only one to challenge Edith Evans this century or at any rate in my lifetime, and it does so by coming from an altogether different corner of the text. The Smith Bracknell is no dominant dowa- ger, cascading from a great social height, but instead an infinitely more neurotic par- venue, deeply uncertain of her own social security and therefore all the more deter- mined not to get caught up with people found in handbags at Victoria Station, no matter the line.
But around this stunning and stupendous comic turn, on stage for barely a quarter of the play, Hytner has oddly and uncharac- teristically failed to build a coherent pro- duction. True, he has not been much helped by Bob Crowley's wonderfully off- centre set, which suggests not so much Oscar Wilde as Lewis Carroll: with every- thing at odd angles, one half-expects the Mad Hatter to join Algernon's tea party.
As for Algernon and John Worthing, Richard Grant and Alex Jennings start the evening as a couple of lip-kissing gay young things, an intriguing intellectual idea given the trials of Oscar Wilde's private life at the time he was writing this, but one inca- pable of being sustained once the girls appear. All through the evening there is the faint offstage sound of theories about the play crashing unfinished into the scenery: only the Dame and her despised Prism (Margaret Tyzack) seem to know exactly what they are doing. The two girls, Susannah Harker and Claire Skinner, are hopelessly out of period, and even the great and good Richard Pearson seems not quite yet to have caught the measure of Chasuble. All in all, a tentative evening.
Always beware early unstaged plays by playwrights who later became famous: there is usually some reason why they have not been staged before. David Mamet is the stage- and screen-writer who has set New York's chattering classes abuzz with Oleanna, a somewhat fragile political- correctness duologue soon to be seen over here in a Harold Pinter production with David Suchet at the Royal Court. In the meantime the King's Head gives us his Squirrels, written 20 years ago when the American theatre was full of power-game little dramas written in the wake of Edward Albee's infinitely stronger Zoo Story.
This time around we have a writer so blocked that for 15 years he has been wrestling with the first paragraph of a story about a man on a park bench having his hand bitten by a squirrel — park benches are very big in Zoo Story too. But a writer's block does not make for an unblocked play, and there is nothing that even Edward Petherbridge can do to make us care here about Mamet's hero or his cleaning lady (Sara Kestelman) or his assistant (Steven O'Shea), who finally takes over the story and would, were this a better play like, say, Deathtrap, have at least tried to kill the older man.
And finally to the Riverside Studios comes Invade My Privacy, an intriguing five-character cabaret built around the work of the poet and lyricist Fran Landes- man, she of 'Spring Can Really Hang You
Up The Most'. Jacqueline Dankworth leads a strong cast for Lynda Marlowe, and Landesman's bittersweet, quirky wit (some- where halfway from Sondheim to Ogden Nash) reminds us yet again of the need London has for a resident cabaret theatre where all these songbook shows could find a semi-permanent home.
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