Theatre
Hidden Laughter (Vaudeville)
Anna Christie (Young Vic)
Disenchanted garden
Christopher Edwards
Simon Gray's latest play is set in Harry and Louise's weekend cottage in Devon between 1980 and 1990. Harry (Kevin McNally) is a literary agent, Louise (Felic- ity Kendal) is his wife and an aspiring authoress. The cottage, which Louise dubs `Little Paradise', has an enchanting garden full of geraniums and hollyhocks (although Louise cannot tell the difference). During the first giddy moments after they have acquired the place, it has all the makings of an English rural idyll. But Simon Gray is not exactly well-known for his celebrations of domestic harmony. By the end, a more desolate and fractured atmosphere pre- vails.
Louise takes to her typewriter with a passion and churns out tripy-sounding novels with titles like Daffodil Corner. Meanwhile, around her, the family slowly disintegrates. Harry has a string of mistres- ses, daughter Natalie (Caroline Harker) blows her chances of higher education and drops out, and son Nigel (Samuel West) has a terrible accident. It is a familiar- sounding story of the life-pangs of the middle classes. What gives it a degree of delicacy and mournful irony is the sense that all these characters have glimpsed something beyond the mess they create.
Although the acting is first-rate, I found the parts of Louise and Harry less than entirely convincing. Even though she is a second-rate novelist Louise's status as some sort of writer is not really credible. And Harry's outburst of rage and dis- appointment near the close sounded de- tached from the rest of his part — mere rhetorical sounding-off.
The part that does succeed — and triumphantly too — is Peter Barkworth's brilliantly played vicar Ronnie. Ronnie is a dithering, generous-spirited, repressed homosexual, gardening cleric who has lost his faith. Barkworth succeeds in drawing these elements together into a humane and touchingly funny study. Taken for granted by the other characters as he is, Barkworth is adept at registering pain at their heart- lessness while, with only the occasional flicker of resentment, continuing to offer them his understanding friendship. He offers the play its focus of gentle, ironic, comic loss. The production is directed by the author himself.
At the Young Vic, Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie has been revived in a com- pelling production directed by David Thacker. It is a characteristically booze-, guilt- and doom-laden tale about a Swedish barge captain and his daughter. It is an uneven work, full of melodrama and bom- bast, but it has great power too. Natasha Richardson as the prostitute daughter and John Woodvine as her father tap the play's considerable dramatic resources and give bravura displays. O'Neill is a great if exasperating artist. This is a gripping pro- duction of one of his lesser-known works.
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