Theatre
Max Klapper (The Electric, Portobello Road) The Cherry Orchard (Albcry)
Mixed-media message
Sheridan Morley
Way up the Portobello Road, in an area now rendered almost totally inaccessi- ble due to a traffic-management scheme of baroque horror and chaos unique even in the current annals of the Metropolitan Police, whose undeclared mission has long been to make theatre-going in the capital as unpleasant as possible for all, there lies a movie palace called the Electric, built in 1910 and therefore the country's oldest- surviving purpose-built cinema, not to mention the one where the mass-murderer Christie once made a living as a projection- ist. In recent years it has hit the headlines only because of frequent attempts to tear it down, but miraculously it still stands, just, and is currently the setting for one of the most inventive and innovative and exciting, if also deeply flawed, theatrical experi- ments I have ever seen.
This has, of course, been the year of the centenary of the cinema, though the anniversary has passed without much of note in this country; but in the nick of time comes David Farr's Max Klapper: A Life in Pictures, a play with film in more senses than one. The mixed-media idea is of course nothing new: Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard at the Adelphi shows, at the back of its set, a car chase taken directly from the original movie, and decades ago there was a famous vaudeville routine in which an on-stage comic would react to events taking place on a screen behind him.
Why then is Max Klapper such an innova- tive adventure? Simply because the play and the film have been made, and are shown, simultaneously. Angela Davies's minimal stage set is dominated by a vast movie screen at which the cast regularly turns to stare because only on it will the next development of the plot or their char- acters take place. Farr has chosen to mark the centenary of the movies with a plot lift- ed from almost every Hollywood-on-Holly- wood classic: Max Klapper (charismatically played by Anthony Higgins in an eye patch borrowed from von Sternberg or von Stro- heim) is, when we first meet him, an octo- genarian living in sinister seclusion, interrupted by a young movie-buff journal- ist who suddenly wonders what happened to end his career so abruptly 40 years ago.
From there we flash back on stage and screen to the 1950s: Klapper, caught up in the McCarthy witch-hunt and directing a star who has to hide his homosexuality under a veneer of rakishness, is making a supreme folie de grandeur, a project much akin to von Stroheim's Queen Kelly. To sort out these references, the on-stage movie then has to flash even further back to the 1920s, thereby allowing Ben Hopkins, who has directed the film, to parody with con- siderable wit the Gish sisters and various later auditions for celluloid stardom.
The trouble is that there is altogether too much going on: Farr's play is hugely indebted to Clifford Odets and all his 1950s dramas about the underside of movie moguldom, while the screen parodies veer wildly from late D.W. Griffith to early Orson Welles, none much to do with Holly- wood witch-hunting of decades to come.
For all that, Higgins and Emily Lloyd (as the star who causes Klapper to kill both her and his career) and Jim Dunk as the studio chief and playwright Tracy Letts as the gay actor are a formidable team which many better-organised scripts and theatres would ache for, and the Klapperboard concept of a play within a movie within a play is some- times breathtaking as well as often chaotic in its mixed-media messages and Holly- wood history lurches. The references are all there: all I long for now is a better script, one which could truly many stage and screen, present and past, image and reality.
To the Albery from last season at Strat- ford comes Adrian Noble's highly acclaimed Cherry Orchard with its princi- pals intact: Alec McCowen as the first Gaev in my experience to challenge the Gielgud memories, Peter Copley similarly challenging the ghost of Ralph Richard- son's Firs, David Troughton as an unusual- ly manic Lopakhin and Penelope Wilton as a chilly, low-key Ranyevskaya. But, despite the splendour of the casting, I am less convinced than many colleagues of the brilliance of Noble's staging: using a very minimalist translation by Peter Gill, he seems to have decided in rehearsal that this is largely a play about baggage, mounds of which threaten at times to overtake the rest of the set and all the players. From the very beginning, the family seems to have given up on the estate and their own chances of survival in it; never have I seen a Cherry Orchard in which the last act is everywhere in the first, so that come the auction and the loss of the estate we are only surprised to find it was still in their possession at all. As a result there is only inevitability here, no shock of change or forewarning of total revolution: the game is up before half its players have even had a chance to show their hands, and all we are left with is a pile of trunks. Somehow I think Chekhov meant his comedy-tragedy to be about something more than suitcases, a revelation rather than an extended commercial for Revelation.
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