A touch of magic

As soon as she arrives everything falls apart. Dame Maggie Smith’s appearance in Edward Albee’s 1980 play The Lady From Dubuque marks the point when it all goes wrong. This isn’t her fault. She’s the most watchable and effective thing on stage and even now, on the fringes of old age, her lazy twangy sexy drawl still has a touch of magic. But her part is a dud cheque. We’ve spent the first act watching a group of drunken sophisticates swapping caustic banter. Sam’s wife Jo is suffering from some lethal disease which frees her from all social constraint and prompts an enjoyable, if undemanding, hour of drawing-room comedy. Enter Elizabeth. She claims to be Jo’s mother even though she looks nothing like her, and Jo, conveniently pole-axed at just the right moment, is too zonked to verify the identification. Sam asks for explanations but Elizabeth gives maddeningly imprecisely answers. ‘Who are you?’ he shrieks long after we’ve realised that he’ll never find out. Elizabeth isn’t a human being but a poetic possibility, a sort of an angel in a Chanel suit sent from heaven to collect Jo’s departing soul. And there’s the problem. God’s errand-girls aren’t like us, they’re not capable of appetite, doubt, moral contradiction, spiritual growth or any of the things that make a character dynamic.

She’s accompanied by Oscar, from the Afroâ“Caribbean sector of paradise, exquisitely played by Peter Francis James (who sounds like an actor in dire need of a surname). His role is even more unsatisfactory than Dame Maggie’s because as soon as Oscar shows up everyone in the room turns into a tedious racist. Of course Oscar, being a member of the choir invisible, shrugs the ethnic taunts aside. What kind of message is that? Racism can be overcome if black people take the simple precaution of dwelling in eternity.