Theatre

Six Degrees of Separation (Royal Court)

As You Like It

(Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park) The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (Cottesloe)

The right connections

Sheridan Morley

Iam your new drama critic and we are (as you may or may well not be delighted to discover) already closely related. Between any two people on this planet there are apparently in the chain of genet- ics only six others: hence Six Degrees of Sep- aration, the title of a John Guare play which became the snob hit of Broadway three seasons ago and is now in its British premiere at the Royal'Court.

Mr Guare's play is about many things, not least the true story of a young black confidence trickster who managed to pass himself off as the son of Sidney Poitier and thus infiltrate several of the glossiest apart- ments on Park Avenue, claiming that he had been mugged in central Park and therefore needed a place to stay. The dramatist has subsequently had to fight off a series of legal claims from the trickster that the play has `stolen the copyright in his life story. which gives you some idea of the heat with which the embers of the Ix n- fire of the vanities are still srnotIldering in uptown Manhattan.

But the play is, as it hapneqs, aboqt rather more than just the Melling of a recent high-society scam scatidO better suited to Taki's column. Six Degrees oflcp- ' aration takes the temperature of affluent New Yorkers at the end of the Eighties. Well-meaning, liberal, gullible, eager not to appear racist, lonely and deeply insecure, they are principally taken in.by the intruder because he promises them walk-on, or rather dance-on, roles in his father's upcoming movie of Cats — though why prominent art dealers would wish to be caught up in so improbable a project is never adequately explained.

But central to Guare's thesis here is the idea that everybody, not just the black intruder, is engaged on some kind of hoax: the art dealer selling dodgy masterpieces to his South African client, a white man who notes, 'We have to stay there to educate the black workers, and we'll know we've been successful when they kill us'; his wife who chats to us in the audience, taking us back through the story in the hope that we'll see it all through her inanely non- judgmental eyes; their children, filled with a kind of random hatred of parents end- lessly trying to do the right, radical-chic thing in a rapidly disintegrating world.

Guare, as in his much earlier House of Blue Leaves, is writing on the borderline where the American waking dream becomes a nightmarish fantasy: all of his characters are trying to reach out to one another, to make the right connections that will link up the six degrees of separation, and yet all are digging themselves deeper into pits of isolation and misunderstanding.

His is a minimalist piece, across a no- interval 90 minutes, and it has much in common with the double-sided Kandinsky which hangs over the set in the beginning: you have to stare at the puzzle for a while before it even begins to fall into place. A quirky, impressionistic, off-centre play has at its centre, here as originally in New York, a radiant performance by Stockard Channing, around whom a local cast is now grouped at a respectful distance. She alone, a long-time partner of Guare, has found a way of rounding out his characters so that a woman written in shorthand and some- times stereotype takes on a vibrant life which transcends the immediate fashion- ability of her surroundings.

Yet there is still something missing: it is as though Sondheim people, high-rise Manhattan agonised introverts, have sud- denly been hurled into a play by Ben Jon- son and told to survive as best they can in their new surroundings. Guare asks all the right questions about post-modern New York but doesn't let his characters hang around long enough to sort out any of the answers. 'How do we keep the experience?' asks Stockard Channing, and Royal Court audiences may also be wondering about just that. Phyllida Lloyd directs.

The limited backstage budget and summer-seasonal nature of the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park have always mili- tated against a very high or experienced standard of Shakespearian verse-speaking and though this has been improving of late it is sharply intelligent of the actress/direc- 'It's no good — the kidney's rejecting him.' for Maria Aitken to set As You Like It in a radically new frame. Her notion is that we are at a country-house party of the 1930s, where it has been decided to make a film of the play. A narcissistic host, of the Brian Howard variety, is doubling as director and Jaques: scenes are interrupted, run back- wards, halted for the arrival of wrestling stunt-men. A camera crane towers above the set, wind-machines are brought on to stir the leaves, and the Forest of Arden is ready for action.

And, miracle of miracles, what might have been a maddeningly tricksy and gim- micky notion works very well: the play remains intact, a rustic pastoral with strong echoes of the Olivier/Elisabeth Bergner film version from the 1930s, and the usual limitations of a young Regent's Park cast are neatly overcome by the suggestion that they are simply the weekend guests of a demanding host, abruptly forced to take part in these classical charades.

Rex Harrison's grand-daughter Cathryn makes a feisty Rosalind, Ian Holm's daugh- ter Sarah-Jane is a strong Celia, but the evening unquestionably belongs to Bette Bourne from the gay theatre troupe Bloolips, whose Jaques is far and away the most intelligent, haunting and genuinely original I have ever seen. Here is a man halfway from D.W. Griffith to the grave, determined to control all around him but unable to make any peace with his own life, and it's a performance to recall when the awards next come around.

And finally to the National, where Jim Cartwright's The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is a curious and somewhat over-rated hothouse domestic drama built around the astonishing talent of the actress Jane Hor- rocks for vocal impressions. She plays the Little Voice, of the title, a wan teenager who has lived in an upstairs room for so long with the records of Judy Garland and Edith Piaf that she can even repeat their pauses for breath and, presumably, the cracks in the old vinyl. Her termagant mother, played with manic over-the-top energy by Alison Steadman, conspires with a no-good showman lover to get Little Voice in front of a club audience, where

predictably she breaks down, unable to get the voices from her records out of her head and on to a stage. Eventually, as mother's house burns to ashes and true love arrives in the unlikely shape of a British Telecom engineer, Little Voice finds her own voice and all ends happily.

Mr Cartwright has one or two good jokes Of you are agoraphobical', screeches the appalling mother to her reclusive daughter, `you can just get out of the house'); but the idea being noised abroad by some of my colleagues that we have here an English suburban Glass Menagerie seems to me to be going it a bit. Sam Mendes directs.

Spread a Little Happiness, Sheridan Mor- ley's celebration of the songs of Vivian Ellis, opens at the Whitehall Theatre on 29 June.