Theatre
Shakespeare For My Father (Helen Hayes Theater, New York) Relative Values (Chichester)
Daddy dearest
Sheridan Morley
Athe rump end of an undistinguished Broadway season, of which one of the rare highlights has been the return of Julie Andrews in a superb Sondheim anthology concert alas unscheduled for this side of the Atlantic, another London-born actress long resident in America is currently taking New York by storm. At the Helen Hayes Theater, Shakespeare For My Father is a remarkable solo show which mixes classical theatre and personal therapy in a manner only available to an Old Vic actress who has spent the last 20 years in California.
The actress in question is Lynn Red- grave, the father of the title is Sir Michael, and the show starts from her one terrible and terrifying discovery, just at the time of his death, that in a detailed daily account of his life and times he had never even troubled to note the day of her birth, nor in later life had he been much aware of her existence.
At a time when many American writers (and indeed such local talents as those of Jill Tweedie and Blake Morrison) are set- ting out from the unsafe harbour of a paternal death to redefine their own identi- ties, Lynn's two-hour monologue touches many familiar bases. True, she does not explain the true nature of her father's bisexuality, so recollections of a chilly household are a little hard to fathom: but she does explain at least some of his diffi- culties as a parent and hers as his child, and soon enough, beneath a symbolically shadowy portrait of the great Stratford hero of the 1950s, she becomes Cordelia to his vanished Lear before embarking on a whole gallery of Shakespeare's other hero- ines from Ophelia to Viola.
She is not in truth the greatest of Shake- spearian actresses, and very often what work best here are the anecdotes of her days at the National in the early 1960s with Olivier and Coward and Maggie Smith and Edith Evans, all natural targets for her con- siderable comic gifts as a mimic. But what makes Shakespeare For My Father so impressive, and the reason I so hope she will bring it to London, is the courage with which she confronts her father's ghost on his own classical territory.
All of us who are the children of actors know this landscape: Lynn inhabits the shadows between the footlights and the dressing-room, illuminated in that curious twilight where the only trustworthy reflec- tions are the ones in the dressing-room mirrors. While never attempting to upstage her father, she recalls his career, detailing his disasters, celebrating his triumphs, dwelling on his terrible last illness and never forgetting the appalling cruelty of Olivier when his old rival started to lose his memory at the onset of Parkinson's dis- ease, which was eventually to kill him but not before it had brought him back togeth- er with his younger daughter.
Shakespeare For My Father is at once a chilling and a cheering account of what it means to grow up in a family of actors. It has been intelligently and economically staged by Lynn's husband, John Clark, and resonates with courage both theatrical and personal. Miss Redgrave richly deserves the Tony Award for which she has been nominated and her show deserves to be seen over here for its radiance and its regrets.
At Chichester there is a rare revival by Tim Luscombe of Relative Values, the country-house party comedy of appalling manners which gave Noel Coward his first post-war success in 1951 after a long period in the critical wilderness. It is in truth nowhere near as strong as Hay Fever, the get-the-guests comedy of his that it most resembles, but retains considerable fascina- tion for the shifts it betrays in Coward's political and social affiliations.
In Hay Fever, you will recall, the Bliss family are a group of over-the-top theatri- cal luvvies who, with the tacit approval of both dramatist and audience, set about demolishing the 'normal' civilian outsiders who are unwise enough to pay them a weekend visit. But 30 years on, Noel's affections had switched from the theatricals to the civilians: when in Relative Values a Hollywood star about to marry the son of the house turns out to be the sister of the resident lady's maid and companion, she is swiftly despatched back to the movies before she can threaten the stability of the stately homes of England. Susan Hamp- shire, Sarah Brightman and Edward Duke head up a suitably Cowardly cast.
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