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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Masochists and miserablists

Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress
Leicester Square Theatre

Liberty
Globe

Sons of York
Finborough

Let’s hear it for those ageing babes and their one-gran shows. Hip, hip, hip-replacement. Britt Ekland and Elaine Stritch are already at it, and here comes Joan Rivers who wastes no time wasting the opposition. ‘Anyone see Elaine Stritch? Wonderful show wasn’t it? Mind you, it was all me, me, me, me, me, me. “I understudied Ethel Merman. And I drank. I worked with Noel Coward. And I drank. I tried to seduce Rock Hudson. And he drank.”’

At 75, Rivers is easy on the eye, like a well-set egg custard in a wig. Surgery has erased her face of its equine gauntness and given it a wholesome kittenish roundness which counterbalances her comic persona very well. That mix of cutesy innocence and toxic wit is irresistible, and when it comes to working a crowd she’s world class. But this show has higher ambitions.

Billed as a play, and set in her dressing room backstage at the Oscars where she’s about to conduct red-carpet interviews for a TV network, the show blends drama with stand-up. At its core is a sustained lament for the chronic instability of her showbiz career. Still haunted by the trauma of being sacked from a prime-time TV slot in 1990, Rivers cries out defiantly, ‘No one should have the right to take this away from me!’ And the crowd responds with tidal surges of tear-drenched applause. Fair enough. And now back to reality. Like it or not, TV execs do have the right — or rather the power — to terminate an employee’s contract. There’s no ‘should’ in a TV schedule. To pretend otherwise is a mawkish self-delusion. At times this show drifts away from humour and towards sentimentality, moralising, and even the sort of self-importance Rivers usually delights in exploding. Who’s idea was it to dress up a comedy routine as drama? It’s clumsy. Look at that awkward title. It’s unnecessary, too. Rivers is at her best doing her unique and outrageous gags. ‘When I was starting out I played any gig I was offered, even funerals. I’d open the coffin lid, sit the corpse up and do a ventriloquism act.’ To try and improve on that is to misunderstand one’s appeal which, paradoxically, is the very error Rivers imputes to the TV suits.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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