Theatre
Amy's View (National Theatre) Blithe Spirit (Chichester) The Wood Demon (Playhouse)
Brave acts
Sheridan Morley
Lce his long-time director Richard Eyre, the most prolific and faithful of National Theatre dramatists this last decade or so is leaving the South Bank on a considerable high: David Hare's new play Amy's View is not only another triumph of his national temperature-taking, but also that still less fashionable form of drama, the backstage play.
Once upon a time, every self-respecting dramatist from O'Neill and Odets to Cow- ard, Rattigan and even Mamet and Williams felt their portfolios incomplete without at least one look through a dress- ing-room glass darkly. But with the recent fear and loathing of quvviedom' has come the belief that plays written, however well, in greasepaint are unlikely to appeal to a non-Equity audience. So what Hare has cunningly done is to save the ritual dress- ing-room confrontation until the very end of a touching, chilling, hugely observant contemporary social drama, most of which takes place in an equally unfashionable and long-lost setting, a country house in the Thames valley.
It is more than a little courageous of Hare to set his stirring defence of the live drama within the framework of what might
at first seem a set vacated 40 years ago by the likes of Enid Bagnold and Robert Bolt, and left derelict ever since; braver still, though I appear to be alone in noticing this, is to open Amy's View exactly as Cow- ard opened his 1925 Hay Fever, with a cele- brated if now outdated actress suddenly confronted with the arrival in her living- room of an unwelcome weekend guest in the shape of her daughter's apparently unsuitable boyfriend. The only difference, 70 years later, is that we are now in Pang- bourne whereas Coward set his play a few miles downstream at Marlow.
But having paid this ritual, and I trust conscious, obeisance to the old backstage dramas, Hare moves his swiftly forward; his play is about the victims of Lloyd's insur- ance crash, the supremacy of cinema over theatre for the young, and above all else Amy's view, which is essentially that love will conquer all just so long as everyone is very nice to everyone else.
Only of course they are not: around Amy (a suitably wide-eyed if sometimes inaudi- ble Samantha Bond) are gathered her mother (Judi Dench, as the predatory old actress unable to believe in a world no longer run in her image), a drunken neigh- bour who turns out to be the Lloyd's villain (Ronald Pickup), and a pushy young televi- sion director (Eoin McCarthy), this last a somewhat thankless nine-pin role, though not so much of an afterthought as that of the young actor (Christopher Staines) who has come out of nowhere to sustain, with remarkably little help, the final scenes. There is also an old and later paralysed grandmother, wonderfully played in a wel- come return to the stage by Joyce Redman.
In the end, this is not as powerful a Hare piece as Skylight or indeed Racing Demon or Plenty, largely because across the 16 years of the play's development the author himself seems to get a little confused about his own priorities of national and personal concern. The declining respect awarded to those actors who stay away from films and television? The fact that some very nice if somewhat careless people got scorched by Lloyd's? The way that a trendy, Taranti- noesque film director specialising in exploding skulls will always play to better houses than the very best dramatists?
All of that is at the heart of Amy's View, but her view is too clouded; her sudden, arbitrary last-act demise seems the only way Hare could get us to care at least in retrospect about her somewhat dim vision, and so when the final confrontation comes between her still self-absorbed mother and the young director who has married and then betrayed her, we know from the start that the stage lady will win out over the film guy precisely because that is what this play has been all about from the beginning.
It is only at the very last that we get the glimmering of a new thought: that, in the end, an actress is always alone because no writer, no director, no relative can go out there with her to the only place it really matters and where she most wants to be. Judi Dench conveys, as only she can, a woman who finds more life in theatre than in life, and Amy's View is at the last reflect- ed in a dressing-room mirror. But that mir- ror is not in fact Amy's, and thus does a marvellous play lose some of its ultimate purpose and direction. For all that, hasten along: Eyre's staging of the last 60 seconds is one of the most breathtaking representa- tions of the trick of theatre I have ever seen, and I write as one who began watch- ing plays at the age of five from just this perspective all of half a century ago.
On the main Chichester stage, Blithe Spirit got off to a somewhat shaky start on opening night, not least because Dora Bryan stepped in at short notice to replace an injured (now happily recovered) Mau- reen Lipman, and has as yet only a nodding acquaintance with the dialogue. But as she (Madame Arcati, I hasten to add) has always been a mad old bat, the play does not suffer unduly; and it gains considerably from the return to the stage after far too long away of Twiggy, an ethereal Elivra. Steven Pacey is wonderfully urbane as the unfortunate author, ultimately henpecked from beyond the grave by two ghostly and ghastly wives, while Belinda Lang does what she can with the ever-underwritten role of Ruth. Tim Luscombe's thoughtful, underrated production will settle in on the road to London; all it needs is time, and perhaps some fractionally better timing.
And finally, welcome back yet again to the Playhouse, under its fifth new manage- ment in 20 years; this unlucky theatre now has a brave new owner-producer, and the opening production (a rare West End sighting of Chekhov's Vanya prototype The Wood Demon) is certainly hugely adequate if little more. We shall I fear need some- thing more dramatically sexy if that beauti- ful Thamesside theatre is truly to come back to any kind of sustained life.
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