Beyond redemption
Lloyd Evans
Absurd Person Singular Garrick Women of Troy Lyttelton Cinderella Old Vic
Five years as a critic and I’ve never seen anything by Alan Ayckbourn. With a flicker of apprehension in my heart I took my seat at the Garrick. Absurd Person Singular (nice title, nothing to do with the play) begins at a bourgeois drinks party. Calamity unfolds. Wife forgets to buy tonic, dons mackintosh, exits into rain via back door, returns from off-licence, finds back door locked so must re-enter house via front door without being spotted by guests because rained-on mac looks silly. See her problem? Nor did I, but the comedy of the first act rests entirely on one’s ability to sympathise with this trifling dilemma. Act two climaxes with the same woman emptying a bowl of water over her husband. The third act culminates with a game of musical forfeits.
I was flabbergasted. The feebly structured script is completely hobbled by its lack of wit, surprise or comic invention. The sets are designed to be both realistic and semi-magical and are amputated halfway up to reveal a cloudless starry sky. Odd that. It’s pouring with rain. At least the acting’s enjoyable. Jenny Seagrove is wonderful as a stroppy drunken aristo. Jane Horrocks fizzes and sparkles as the fretful wife. Playing her ghastly husband, David Bamber is strangely stiff. He’s been made up to look far too old and he can’t find the character’s warmth. John Gordon Sinclair, on autopilot, plays a smarmy architect beautifully. But nothing can save the script. Ayckbourn specialises in the comedy of embarrassment. I was embarrassed to be in the same room as this inane frivolity. I was equally disappointed by Katie Mitchell’s Women of Troy, a mixture of strange errors and rudderless conceptualism. The setting is a concrete bunker with a low ceiling that ruins the Lyttelton’s acoustics and makes half the cast inaudible. The male leads play the conquering Greeks as nervy little wimps. The captured Trojan women, after a ten-year siege, wear ballgowns, sexy kitten heels and posh-hairdos. Why’s that? Well, when you’re about to be raped and murdered you dress up. Basic etiquette. The acting is a predictable selection of drama-school panic attacks, and the tragic speeches are interrupted by big-band jazz numbers which the captive women dance and frolic to. Doubtless this is supposed to represent the indomitable spirit of woman or something, but that kind of prize-essay symbolism sets the audience at a distance. It makes us think. Drama should make us feel. This is a dreadfully uninvolving version of one of Euripides’ trickiest plays. And though I was delighted to see Sinead Matthews on stage — a comic actress with superstar qualities — I realised that to cast her as Cassandra is like asking Emu to play Hamlet. One to avoid.
Miles better is Stephen Fry’s panto at the Old Vic. The script is clever but not annoyingly so. Fry has actually sat down and thought about the characters. Cinderella’s life centres on housework so he gives her a speech analysing the competing claims of pine and lemon disinfectant. Buttons is a bar-room philosopher. ‘According to Plato,’ he says airily, ‘happiness is contingent upon virtue.’ ‘That’s all very well,’ says Cinders, ‘but I’ve got sausages to prick.’ Pauline Collins’s fairy godmother is amusing, highly intelligent and sullenly resentful of her obligation to Cinders. She insults her like a dismayed mum. ‘You’re too submissive. It’s a case of pathological inanition.’ Paul Keating, as Buttons, gives an effortlessly charming performance and Sandi Toksvig is delightful as the cross-dressing pipe-smoking Narrator. During a cooking-show parody she produces a Tesco bag. ‘Oh, we like Tescos, don’t we?’ Pause. ‘Keeps the riff-raff out of Waitrose.’ This is a wonderfully adult panto with lots of swearing (nothing too embarrassing, though) and lots of jokes too — good, bad, and very, very elderly. ‘The other day I picked a buttercup. And I thought, why do people leave buttocks lying around?’ Didn’t get much of a laugh but even the lousy gags are saved by the brimming bonhomie of the ensemble. Mark Lockyer does a magnificent ugly sister and at one point he breaks off to give an impersonation of Ian McKellen which craftily hints that by playing the Dame in panto Sir Ian was merely patronising the genre. (And I thought I was alone in that heresy.) Did the kids love the show? Well, who cares? The filthy little tikes will shriek their heads off at anything and they don’t pay for the tickets so sod them. Even if you’re child-free, this is as much fun as a crate of champagne.
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