Theatre
Sweet Charity (Battersea Arts Centre) The Kitchen (Royal Court) The Madness of Esme and Shaz (Theatre Upstairs)
Stripped of the glitz
Sheridan Morley
Just as the ongoing recession has been good for solo shows and one-set, four-char- acter comedies, so it has caused an intrigu- ing rethink of old Broadway musicals. We currently have three in London alone (Sweeney Todd at the National, Cabaret at the Warehouse and now Sweet Charity at the Battersea Arts Centre) which are being revived in studio stagings far removed in glamour and glitz and big-band appeal from their Broadway origins of 20 or so years ago.
The big surprise of this trio is Sweet Charity: whereas it might have been expect- ed that, by putting Cabaret back to its Berlin nightclub roots and Sweeney back to its East London melodrama, a new close- up intensity would be achieved, who'd have thought that Sweet Charity would actually
benefit by being stripped of all its Broad- way and Hollywood glamour?
But here, too, as Phil Wilmott's engag- ingly tacky, no-budget production suggests, is an essentially seedy show about failed cabaret stars being unable to make it once they hit the daylight. Stripped of all the old Bob Fosse knee-jerk choreography, given only a tinny trio where once there was an orchestra, Neil Simon's sly, cynical book at last comes into its own, as do the dour, bit- tersweet lyrics of Dorothy Fields. This is a show about failure both professional and romantic, something that neither Gwen Verdon on stage nor Shirley MacLaine on film could ever quite bring themselves to acknowledge, because it is well known that in big-time American showbiz, failure doesn't sell.
`Dances?' says one of Charity's showgirls, `who dances? We defend ourselves to music' and that is what Wilmott's grainy, sleazy rediscovery is all about: Brecht/Weill go to Broadway.
Even in a generation of brilliant young directors, it is hard to think of one who has made his name so rapidly or so flamboyant- ly as the new Royal Courtier, Stephen Daldry. With An Inspector Calls about to open on Broadway, Machinal just closed at the National and now The Kitchen (his first main-staging at the Court he has just inher- ited from Max Stafford-Clark), there can be little doubt that within a year he has achieved the three most widely discussed productions in town.
Yet I have a problem with The Kitchen, and it is the same one I had with An Inspector Calls: Daldry's desire not just to direct but radically to reshape the material he has chosen to direct. For better or (as I alone seem to think) for worse, Priestley's Inspector will never be himself again: in the case of The Kitchen, what has happened is a drastic rethink of the ending, and though this must have the blessing of the author, who was around during rehearsals, I'm far from convinced that it's an improvement.
In The Kitchen as written and first staged, the lights go down on a stand-off between the bemused manager and his staff, one of whom has just run amok and destroyed both kitchen and restaurant. In the current highly balletic staging, the stand-off ends with the staff going meekly back to work, thereby all too neatly answer- ing the final question ('What is there more?'), rather than leaving it up to us to decide. Once again we have Daldry as dramatist which is unfortunate, given how good he is as director: on this occasion he has torn the heart out of the Court's audi- torium, thereby allowing Mark Thompson to design far and away the most realistic set ever built there, a fully functioning cater- ing kitchen complete with everything but food.
That set is the show's only real star, though Christopher Fulford has his apoca- lyptic moments as the maddened chef: other performances are more variable, but the energy is five-star.
Upstairs at the Royal Court, Sarah Daniels's The Madness of Esme and Shaz is a weird and wondrous black comedy about two women of very different generations, both traumatised by sexual abuse, who form themselves into an odd couple and take to the road just as in all the most fash- ionable American movies. Except that these two are in their own ways so dysfunc- tional as to belong in a comedy by Ayck- bourn, while their ambitions are really no greater than those of Willy Russell's self- taught escapees.
Esme (Marlene Sidaway) is the old spin- ster civil servant dragged back to gun-tot- ing life by the manic tearaway Shaz (Tanya Ronder) and in this fluid, funny, soap- operatic adventure are several memorable character insights into women who have been slashed by the system, as well as moments of imponderable and often implausible melodrama as Daniels takes her play all over the place in search of a halfway satisfying conclusion.
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