Theatre
Dead Funny (Savoy) Peer Gynt (Barbican Pit) La Traviata (Drill Hall)
The great return
Sheridan Morley
Suitably enough it was the producers of The Rocky Horror Show, creators of the notorious Time-Warp, who have pioneered what is now an increasingly popular West End fashion. That show never officially opens or closes, it just hovers like a space- ship above Shaftesbury Avenue, alighting whenever it spies an empty theatre and staying there until something better comes along. In an increasingly shaky West End economy, other producers now seem to have seen the merits of instant revival: the two biggest hits of 1994, Three Tall Women and Dead Funny, are back this week with revised casts; it must be reckoned that there are still more people wishing to see them than risk anything that might have happened since.
Dead Funny, now at the Savoy, is still directed by its author Terry Johnson, the man who brought Dali and Freud together for Hysteria and who engineered the meet- ing of Marilyn, Einstein and Senator McCarthy for Insignificance. That Johnson is the most agile comic manipulator of his generation is beyond doubt — he is Ray Cooney with a triple first in history, psy- chology and politics. Here his concern is the weekend of 1992 when both Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd were found dead in their flats, and for the Dead Comics Soci- ety, of which most of his cast are members, this is a rare opportunity for mourning and mimicry.
One member is a doctor specialising in hysterectomies but unable to touch his own wife, another is a mother-obsessed gay, and two others are sexually challenged neigh- bours with one of whom the doctor has had an unwise affair. All the makings of French farce and English domestic tragedy are here, as Belinda Lang and Kevin McNally lead a new team in this bitterly brilliant analysis of people who will die for a laugh but cannot live for a relationship.
When John Barton's Peer Gynt first opened at Stratford last year it was in the immediate wake of Ninagawa's vastly mis- conceived epic at the Barbican, and was therefore chiefly applauded for its still, small, soft focus. What is clear now, as the production has a brief London run in the Pit, is that it is also a work of stunning poetry. The translator is one of our great- est living playwrights, Christopher Fry, himself shamefully ignored by both the RSC and the National of late, and what he has achieved here is the reduction of Peer to his minimalist essentials.
A cast of less than a dozen double and redouble the other figures in Peer's life (so that Haydn Gwynne is both his mother Aase and his wife Solveig) but Fry's Peer is essentially the Playboy of the Northern Isles, an ever-youthful Alex Jennings mak- ing it clear that all his travels are essentially taking place inside his head.
This is the chamber version of one of the greatest plays ever written, one like Hamlet that defies the definitive. What we are missing this time is a real sense of drama, since Fry goes resolutely for the Celtic twi- light, but we learn far more of the inner nature of Peer as he goes round and about and on to the next crossroads for his final meeting with the Button Moulder.
Not only has Barton discovered an unknown additional scene for Peer and Solveig and her father from the original manuscript, he has also (with this Fry ver- sion) re-established the huge folk-poem that was Ibsen's original intent.
Alex Jennings plays Peer as an ageless Irish peasant, refusing even in the central acts to age or costume him to suit the scenery: this is a spare, spartan but hugely haunting evening.
At the Drill Hall (but only until 7 Octo- ber), Music Theatre London have a stun- ning La Traviata, sung in English and staged by Nicholas Broadhurst and his translator/conductor Tony Britten as though it were a new Sondheim rather than the old Verdi derived from La Dame Aux Camelias.
A century and a half after it was per- formed for the first time in Venice, the story of the playboy and the courtesan comes up as a chilly urban fable of lost love, wonderfully sung by Jill Washington and Robert Millner in a version which dra- matically cuts through the old Garbo slush to give us a gritty, gutsy tragedy. In the absence of great new small-scale contem- porary British musicals, we may as well hope that Britten has the energy and the budget to give us the old opera-house stan- dards in this brave new form.
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