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Literary juggler

Lloyd Evans

Wednesday, 18th June 2008

Afterlife
Lyttelton

Dickens Unplugged
Comedy

Then there’s Reinhardt’s work itself. He specialised in fabulously lavish settings of classic plays sometimes using a cast of 300, with 1,700 different costumes. Here at last is something theatrical. Until you try representing it in the theatre. It’s impossible unless you have the budget of the nuclear submarine fleet. Reinhardt stands gazing into the wings while one of his Byzantine productions unfolds luxuriously off-stage and a prerecorded audience cheers and applauds. And since we can’t see what Reinhardt is seeing he might as well be in a pub theatre staring into a broom cupboard.

Frayn has a final lethal conceit to deliver. One of Reinhardt’s favourite texts was Everyman, a medieval morality play written in rhyming couplets, and Frayn has merged this script with Reinhardt’s story. Genius! But unless you know Everyman, and few do, the act of welding lacks any resonance. It mires everything in confusions and dud double meanings. The sole virtue of the conceit is it appeals to Frayn where it matters most to Frayn. In the brain. He isn’t alone in having an overdeveloped cerebral faculty. When future scholarship surveys the English comic playwrights who emerged in the 1970s, the quality that will appear to have deprived them of greatness is their cleverness. Cleverness is a substitute for feeling. And at the same time it’s no substitute at all. As I left the Lyttelton I heard a punter complain, ‘Boring boring boring.’ That’s unfair but also accurate. The play struggles to hold one’s interest over three hours but it contains something valuable. Ideally it should be mounted as a gallery performance with the audience free to come and go as they please. Let them glimpse a vanished era in all its radiance, beauty and power and then move on.