Theatre
Salad Days (Vaudeville) The Designated Mourner (National)
Tartuffe (Almeida)
Fresh, free and charming
Sheridan Morley
Athe curtain fell, perhaps about 20 minutes later than in an ideal cut it should have, on the Vaudeville revival of Salad Days, an elegantly dressed man in his late fifties, possibly a successful lawyer or city financier, broke into floods of tears. Ned Sherrin's production, I suggested, was really not as bad as all that; on the contrary, he explained in what I think may be a more general reaction, he was weeping for his lost youth and for all the happy memories the show brought back for him across 40 years.
Now that we have it back at its original home, Julian Slade's score comes up sounding as fresh and free and charming as ever. Slade, Sandy Wilson and Vivian Ellis were for their postwar period the musical equivalent of a task-force of British sol- diers holding out with slim rations, no cash and often still slimmer shows against the great American juggernauts rolling relent- lessly into Drury Lane.
Now that we make our own musicals rather better than do the Americans, there seems less need of Salad Days: the late Dorothy Reynolds's book is surprisingly ter- rible, and it seems curious that neither Ned Sherrin nor one of his stars, Kit Hesketh- Harvey, has felt the need for some drastic retouching. In a company varying from the charming to the charmless, the performance of the night comes from Kit's 'Widow', Richard Sisson, who as the mute Troppo manages a sequence of mime routines that would be the envy of Marceau himself.
And let us not underestimate the impor- tance of this show: it was because Slade once showed a ten-year-old Cameron Mackintosh the workings of the magic piano that we now have the greatest stage musical industry in world history. All the same, I wish they had brought us back one of Slade's more underrated scores, Vanity Fair perhaps, or Trelawny, rather than the one that most of us seem to know line by line, sometimes even more accurately than this cast.
More of an event than a drama, The Des- ignated Mourner plays only 20 already sold- out performances at the National's Cottesloe before its star, Mike Nichols, has to return to Hollywood to film Primary Col- ors. Not that he's the only celebrity involved here: his co-stars are Miranda Richardson and David de Keyser, his author is Wallace Shawn of My Dinner with Andre and his director is another star play- wright, David Hare.
What they have gathered to give us is distinctly curious: a triple monologue run- ning an unbroken three hours in which the three players sit at a long table and talk not to each other but straight out front to us; some of Nichols's speeches are indeed so long that he appears to be reading them off some sort of table-top autocue. The story, such as it is, starts off faintly autobiograph- ical: the Nichols character is the son-in-law of a famous American author just as Wally Shawn is the son of the great New Yorker editor William. But here the parallels start to recede; there seems to have been some sort of artistic holocaust, in which those left alive are only the few who can no longer recall anything about John Donne. Nichols has a chilly wife and a father-in-law to remind him of his own inadequacies and past failures, but soon his personal story fades into an apocalyptic account of how the anticultural barbarians are not only at the gates but inside all of us. In his London stage debut, Nichols is cheerful, chubby, oddly bland for so harsh a fable; the other two are content making the odd interrup- tion, like guests on a singularly poorly directed television chat show.
At the Almeida, Jonathan Kent's Tartuffe also runs a couple of hours without an interval, but there all resemblance ends: this is a wonderfully vital and witty staging of the Richard Wilbur translation, played at such a breathtaking pace that for much of the evening we could almost be watching a Feydeau farce rather than its 17th-centu- ry antecedent.
Tom Hollander is a splendidly sinister, manic Tartuffe, the kind of corrupt holy leader who would nowadays, you feel, be leading massed bands of his admirers to some terrible group suicide in the wilds. Ian McDiarmid is Orgon, alternately over- bearing and pathetic as his family starts to desert him on account of his religious obsession with the shyster evangelist; there is an intriguing hint, but no more, that Tartuffe's otherwise inexplicable hold over Orgon may be as much sexual as sacred, and the rest of an immensely powerful cast give us what we have now come to expect of the Almeida: sharp, stylish, brisk discov- eries of classics that the National and the RSC are still doing ponderously at about twice the playing time.
Previous page
