Theatre
From crisis to crisis
Lloyd Evans
How To Lose Friends Arts Becket Theatre Royal Haymarket Love Me Tonight Hampstead
Here's the problem. A friend and col/league has turned his life story into a play and he's starring in it in the West End. I'm the reviewer. Praise would seem like flattery, censure like discourtesy. And who's going to believe me anyway? Ah, well. It's a winner, The show is a triumph. Toby Young is absolutely sensational. (That's the front-of-house posters taken care of.) And it's all true. I saw the play in a previous incarnation with Jack Davenport in the lead role and it didn't quite make sense. Jack Davenport is slim, debonair, well-groomed and handsome. Toby Young is slim, debonair, wellgroomed and handsome in his school photographs. It was like watching Brad Pitt impersonating Les Dawson. Some stories work only when told by their originator. Toby Young plays himself, and a dozen other characters, as he recounts his disastrous five-year attempt to make it as a showbiz journalist in New York during the 1990s. The script, based on Young's book, has emerged from the clarifying labours of several redrafts and is now pared to its neat and witty essentials. Young is a good raconteur, a handy impersonator and not a had mimic. I use these qualifiers advisedly. He's no Peter Ustinov, but he knows how to get the most from his skills and he delivers the material with such an air of conviction that it's impossible not to find it wildly funny. And there's more here than just a set of cool, cosmopolitan anecdotes. Acute direction and deft lighting give the show a real sense of range and substance. The script is nicely orchestrated so that as Young lurches from crisis to crisis you begin to warm to him more and more. The man who likes to be seen as a callow and shamelessly ambitious git becomes an object of sympathy and affection. The transformation is so subtly worked that you barely notice it happening. This isn't a show for those who like fine theatre'. It's better than that. It's a great night out. One of the best things in the West End right now. 'I reckon it'll run and run,' said a blond MP to me afterwards. He's right. If Toby's not still there at Christmas, I'll eat Santa Claus.
And if you are one for 'fine theatre', it doesn't come much finer than Becket. For me, Jean Anouilh has always been Johnnie Boredom, but this script, in a fresh translation by Frederic Raphael and his son Stephen, is a superb piece of entertainment. Tricky, this type of history play. How do you replicate the 12th century without it appearing remote and stiff? Yet how do you impart a sense of naturalism and reality without lapsing into incongruity? This show skilfully avoids these pitfalls and delivers both authentic history and gripping real-life drama. Jasper Britton is superb as Henry II, the witty, malevolent, fun-loving, fornicating, look-at-me-I'm-so-evil despot. The scenes where he humiliates his son, the future Henry III, arc not just hilarious but also feel absolutely true. The title role of Thomas is played by Dougray Scott, an actor I've never seen before but who has suffered the indignity of being tipped for Bond. This is like being tipped for, say, Culture Secretary. It's code: 'Dead safe, nice-looking, quite thick, going nowhere'. Never mind. He brings grace, warmth and a touch of nobility to the difficult role of the obstinate saint. Peter Murnford has created a magnificent range of painterly lighting effects. The closing tableau of Henry naked and prostrate before a blazing vision of the martyred Thomas looks as beautiful as anything by Murillo.
Love me Tonight left me speechless. Not something I'm used to, but I honestly cannot tell you whether Nick Stafford's play is a brilliantly observed family drama or a pile of sentimental suburban tosh. The acting is tiptop. no question. Hugh Ross is outstanding as the head of a household torn apart by a cancer death. The characters are moving, likeable and well-drawn, but the script, which looks funny on the page, got barely a giggle from a mediumsized Saturday-night crowd. Sometimes you glean more from the audience than from the play. A woman in front of me leaned affectionately on to her husband's shoulder and fell fast asleep. An elderly man stomped out noisily in the middle of Act Two and I was about to consign the show to a bodybag when he tiptoed back in (a pee, I think). And everyone clapped like mad at the end. Well, search me. I haven't a clue. Go and see it yourself.
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