Theatre
The Women (Old Vic) Selling the Sizzle (Hampstead)
Other halves
Christopher Edwards
he women who inspired this play', wrote the female author in 1936, 'deserve to be smacked across the head with a meat axe. And that, I flatter myself, is exactly what I smacked them with.' Perhaps, with Joe Orton again in our thoughts, this now sounds like an unfortunate boast. But the rest of the programme notes to Keith Hack's revival of Clare Boothe Luce's celebrated Broadway comedy are a good, informative read. They also give us a flavour of the contemporary critical out- rage that met this harsh portrait of the idle rich ladies of Manhattan. To read the list of adjectives and nouns flung at the play when it first opened is to be made to sit up expectantly, hungry for a feast of plain social butchery promised by a sort of Park Avenue version of Titus Andronicus: lurid, vicious, repellent, venomous, bar- baric savages'. And we assume some of the critics were expressing innocent approval, unlike the 'odious harpies' depicted on stage who complained that American womanhood had been indicted. Not at all, explained Miss Luce. She was writing about a numerically small, easily identified group of females to be found in certain well-known hairdressers, beauty salons, exercise studios, dressmakers and night- clubs living shallow lives of gossip, adultery and divorce. She might have added that she was doing them all a favour by making them amusing as well as odious. Fifty years and a Joan Crawford movie later the play has lost much of its cutting edge. This may be because both the milieu and the targets selected by Miss Luce mean little to us now. We receive no special frisson when she hits the mark. But what does survive intact is a vivid, mostly unflattering but perfectly credible study of female attitudes. And this does carry bite. These women are trapped. They represent a well-heeled slave class whose existence is defined wholly in terms of their relation to men — creatures we never actually meet in the play but about whom we constantly hear from a cast of 19 women; men as lovers, studs, meal-tickets, idols, fathers and husbands.
The play opens at a bridge party with Sylvia (Maria Aitken) spreading poisonous gossip about the husband of Mary Haines (Susannah York). Sylvia has heard from her garrulous manicurist that Stephen Haines is having an affair with a blonde salesgirl called Crystal Allen (Georgina Hale). From here the scene shifts to the manicurist's salon where Mary learns the truth at first hand (so to speak). Mother's advice is sought (leave well alone, a mistress makes a man appreciate his wife) But ignored. Then comes the classic fitting- room encounter between wife and floosie where Georgina Hale's wonderfully crude, rawly sexual tart triumphs easily over Susannah York's somewhat syrupy good nature. In the end, after Crystal betrays Stephen with some cowboy from Holly- wood, Mary tries (unconvincingly it must be said), to out-bitch Crystal as she moves in to reclaim her husband at a nightclub party.
Voytek's Art Deco set suggests a suit- ably harsh, metallic New York smartness but what is missing from the production is pace and a more highly charged hothouse atmosphere of malice. The production drags, there are numerous longueurs and at the moment the humour of the piece is generated by a few characters doing sepa- rate turns. But you sense the possibility of a faster moving and more unified evening which may come as the run develops. And in any case Maria Aitken is clever, brittle and acid as Sylvia and Georgina Hale has turned her already odd voice into an extraordinary drawling, rasping Mae West noise full of will and vulgarity. There are also some memorable one-liners in the play which are a delight in themselves and a reminder that Miss Luce (who is still alive) belongs to the bitingly elegant comic world of Kaufman and Dorothy Parker.
We move into a quite different world in Peter Gibbs's new, slight, sardonic com- edy, Selling the Sizzle. It is set in the kitsch showroom of Desmond (Dinsdale Landen) — a barmy middle-aged northern fancy- I'm streetwise.' goods wholesaler. His stock includes mini- ature dolls in national costume, Vatican spice racks, light-up yoyos and barometers set in the stomachs of wooden bassett hounds. No one is more surprised than Desmond when his new, demon salesman, Malcolm (David Threlfall), manages to sell all the most worthless lines in the ware- house. Malcolm's sales figures are phe- nomenal but the spur that pricks the side of his intent is Desmond's beautiful, icy cool daughter (Caroline Bliss). She samples him, tries him out on approval and then marries her long-standing boyfriend who appears to be able to provide her with what she wants in life — 'wall to wall opulence'.
Malcolm's sales figures wilt as do his charm, self possession and belief in the gaudy rubbish he has so successfully mar- keted. But Desmond has already pointed out to him that there is a distinction between what people need and what peo- ple want; 'people buy people'. And this would appear to be the neatly packaged if unremarkable message of the play. It may come as no surprise to hear that Selling the Sizzle shows none of the craftsmanship, wit or moral vision of either Arthur Miller's or David Mamet's masterpieces on this theme. What it does provide, however, is an opportunity for Dinsdale Landen and David Threlfall to display an accomplished range of comic acting wares. So if you have enjoyed these performers before then the chances are that you will be amused here.
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