Long-lost folly
Sheridan Morley
Contrary to its current sales pitch, Noel Coward's late 1920s Semi Monde (now in a vastly courageous London premiere at the Lyric) did not really fall foul of the theatrical censor 70 or so years ago. With a cast of 30 and a plotline that was to say the least sketchy, it appealed to the epic producer Max Reinhardt and might have worked in Berlin as a kind of non-musical Cabaret. The problem over here and in New York however was that, soon after writing it, Noel went to the movies and saw Garbo, Barrymore and Joan Crawford in Grand Hotel. After that, there wasn't much to be done about Semi Monde which also follows various ill-assorted lives through the revolving doors of a hotel bar, albeit in Paris rather than Berlin.
The director-designer Philip Prowse, who first rediscovered Semi Monde up at his Glasgow Citizens' Theatre more than 20 years ago, has now got an infinitely stylish staging at the Lyric; and a vast cast led by Nicola McAuliffe, John Carlisle and Georgina Hale all manage in the little time at their disposal to create characters as 'jagged with sophistication' as this period piece demands. It was I guess inevitable that Prowse at the end should want to shock us forward to the Nazis and the second world war, which at the time of writing Noel could hardly have foreseen. The production is a monument to stage-management and the producer Thelma Holt's financial courage; it is also a sharp rebuke to the National Theatre, which should have staged this massive, long-lost folly when we ran the Coward Centenary a couple of years ago instead of the infinitely safer, small-cast Private Lives which can still be afforded by any regional rep. Now, at too long last, could they maybe make amends by giving us Cavalcade?
Portentous announcements of a 'season of new plays on historical themes' are in my experience usually hostages to fortune, and sure enough the RSC sequence at the Barbican Pit is off to a thoroughly shaky start with Nick Stafford's Luminosity. The Stratford company has been even less lucky than the National with new plays of late, possibly because the stakes are too high. If a young dramatist has a flop at the Bush or Hampstead, that somehow qualifies under the 'right to fail' charter; if he or she has one at the Barbican or the National, there is blood all over the stage carpet.
And sure enough, Luminosity has received something less than a warm welcome; it tells, ploddingly across 90 minutes, the story of a young black artist looking into her adoptive family background and finding, unsurprisingly, racial intolerance and exploitation of diamond workers going back 200 years into African history. Gemma Boclinetz's sterile, static production on a hopelessly bland set does nothing to help. Last year Stafford had an overblown Battle Royal at the National, also unloved by critics, and this time he has gone too far towards minimalism; when he finds his true centre he'll do something rather better.
The late, lamented Willie Rushton and Barry Cryer (happily still with us) once had a touring show called Two Old Farts in the Night, and I guess that might have been a suitable subtitle for the revue that the writer-comedian Dick Vosburgh and the pianist-songwriter Denis King now bring to the King's Head in Islington. True, they have the added benefit of a talented and glamorous new (to me) comic singer called Sarah Redmond, but in all other respects Beauty and the Beards is very much a trunk show, a hugely enjoyable ragbag of songs and jokes that you sense have been floating around in search of a home since the two men first began working together a dozen or so years ago on a vast range of radio and stage musicals, comedies and often of course musical comedies.
Both men are lifelong travellers through the arcane byways and highways of Broadway and Hollywood, and their show is (like Vosburgh's old, triumphant A Day in Hollywood, A Night in the Ukraine) a waspish, witty tribute to long-lost stars and even longer-lost musicals and movies. Some of this is now getting admittedly pretty dated, but anyone who can rewrite a Paint Your Wagon song for Russian peasants as 'I was born under a squandering Tsar' gets my vote every time.
Then again there are songs to make Walt Disney turn over in his fridge-freezer, a celebrated Noel Coward rewrite of 'Old Man River', a Sound of Music song rewritten for Rose Marie as 'Climb Every Mountie', and of course the Brecht-Weill Oklahoma!, not to mention some gala bad-taste parodies of second world war songs including one about Mussolini 'hanging from a lamppost at the corner of the street'. I am also very fond of Charlton Heston seen as 'a man who can part the Red Sea but apparently not his own hairpiece', and the Norwegian notion of Edvard Grieg checking into the Betty Fjord Clinic.
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