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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Sound effects

Strange fish, Peter Handke. His 1992 play The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other is wordless and consists of semi-amusing visual skits. In James Macdonald’s production these mime acts are played out in an unnamed city that looks as if it’s been moulded from dough by a chimpanzee. It’s like an early rehearsal for a hit-and-miss silent comedy. Tons of mad ideas and a failure rate of 98 per cent. I found myself drifting pleasantly towards sleep and I became vaguely aware of people around me coughing. How would the actors respond? Spectators don’t cough because they’ve got a cough. They cough because they’re dissatisfied. It’s booing without the bad manners. Decent actors are ever alert to the sound, they know the danger it represents and they’re ready to react, to improvise, to make some decisive effort to entice the crowd back from the Beachy Head of boredom. Here no one bothered, they just meandered on through their repertoire of tepid gags. At the curtain call the cast came out to be clapped. Blimey. Twenty-seven actors to make all this dullness? Three could have done the job handsomely. At moments like this the National seems like a fringe venue run by a whimsical billionaire. Which is exactly what it ought to be, of course, and though I judged this show a tedious error the Lyttelton was virtually sold out.

A perfect play is bound to yield imperfections but there were more than I’d bargained for in Peter Gill’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Harry Hadden-Paton seems ill at ease playing the debonair Jack but he’s a lot better than William Ellis. His Algy is a cold suave rich-kid, a maid-tupping rotter rather than a loveable dandy. The accent troubles him too. Sometimes he’s modern, sometimes pre-war. ‘Family’ comes out as ‘feh-mi-leh’. It’s hard to believe a trained actor can muck up received pronunciation. Just talk like Prince Harry, old chap. Penelope Keith’s serenely comic Lady Bracknell is a mountain of self-possessed ambition but even her accent has been tinkered with by the sound archivists. ‘Gal’ for ‘girl’ is fine but why pronounce profile ‘profeel’ simply because the Victorians did? This isn’t a documentary. It’s fun. Dredging up phonetic footnotes to please dialect coaches kills good lines and bores the audience. They want laughs, not lectures. Designer William Dudley decorates Algy’s bachelor pad with a mass of beautiful but overdetailed chinoiserie. The fussy ugly fireplace is surmounted by a doll’s house of shelves crammed with ceramics. That’s nonsense. Algy doesn’t collect antiques. In act two Jack’s garden seems to have been invaded by an army of rubber triffids. And why, in mid-afternoon, does no light penetrate the windows? An eclipse, maybe. Penelope Keith is easily the best thing in this wayward production and with a better cast her triumph would have been certain. Let me add, impertinently and pertinently, that Janet Henfrey is too old for Miss Prism. The pertinent point is that her age makes her last-minute clinch with Dr Chasuble seem an out-of-tune absurdity rather than a delicious closing chord.

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