Woman in Mind
Vaudeville
On the Waterfront
Theatre Royal, Haymarket
The Stone; Seven Jewish Children
Royal Court
Blistering, searing, cracking, scorching. I’m describing the performances of Janie Dee and Stuart Fox in Woman in Mind, Alan Ayckbourn’s comedy about senile dementia. Smouldering, blazing, torrid, incandescent. There’s a few more. But a show can only take so much heat before it buckles and breaks. Janie Dee’s Susan is a frustrated upper-class sex-pot whose grip on reality is weakening and whose marriage to Gerald, a chortling musty vicar, has all but expired. Outstanding as the performances are they make the relationship seem pretty incredible. Janie Dee has too much sophistication, intelligence and Lumley-esque charisma to waste herself on this snuffling nerdy prelate, who buries his face in his local history chronicle rather than in the bosom of his alluring wife. The mismatch recurs in the verbal sparring between Susan and her sad skivvy of a sister-in-law whose Cubist approach to cooking culminates in a dish of Earl Grey omelettes — burnt, of course. Susan’s opportunistic mockery of this hapless dimwit debases rather than uplifts the show.
The disorder which threatens to usurp Susan’s wits is suggested with two nifty devices. Ayckbourn cunningly miswrites dialogue to evoke confusion. ‘December bee?’ is how Susan hears ‘Remember me?’ And her dreary suburban family are regularly displaced by a cartoon-mob of champagne-quaffing toffs who come capering out of the wings to coddle and humour her. At its 1985 première, the play was hailed as a macabre and daring departure for the bourgeoisie’s favourite satirist. Surely an overstatement. Aside from its technical experiments, the script never ventures beyond Ayckbourn’s comfort-zone of naturalistic marital conflict. As director he acquits himself competently enough. In the first act everything is artfully arranged, with plenty of laughs, and the show has that great theatrical rarity, the pulse of real life. But after the interval Susan’s dementia erupts into a full-blown phantasmagorical pageant. The drama runs into a sand-trap and the script becomes an absurd parody of the preceding action. As for Ayckbourn’s clinical analysis, I’ve yet to hear a psychiatrist endorse his theory that dementia is a desirable hallucinogen which sweeps its subjects into a neverland of wish fulfilment and slapstick comedy. Alzheimer’s equals one big ecstasy trip, apparently. I suspect the truth is rather different.
Stephen Berkoff returns to the West End with an ambitious staging of On the Waterfront. The 1954 classic was shot on a B-movie budget in the New York docks using the new realistic documentary style and this combination of factors might have rendered it unstageable. Berkoff pulls it off and gives the show his trademark ‘total theatre’ treatment with gestures towards mime, masque and Greek tragedy. Stylised movements, balletic interludes and a wraparound musical score add texture to the story. Simon Merrells, in the role of Terry Molloy, has the thankless task of following Brando without imitating him and without too obviously not imitating him either. He does this with full credit and he’s matched by Berkoff himself as the doomed mobster Johnny Friendly. Always at his most menacing when at his quietest, Berkoff gives a text-book account of how to dominate the action even when off-stage.
Marius von Mayenburg’s new play, The Stone, studies the various occupants of a Dresden house during the 60 years of upheaval that followed the Great Depression. There are too many stories crowded into 60 minutes of rushed dialogue, and because the play darts around the 20th century like a panicking stickleback it needs to be staged with a relaxed literalness and utter clarity. Instead it’s presented in a cramped white box decorated with bits of stuff raided from a second-hand furniture shop. This lazy, arty staging completely wrecks von Mayenburg’s honourable attempt to examine the unreliability of received history. The director has cheated the audience out of the play. Hopeless.
Talking of self-destruct theatre, I lingered at the Royal Court to watch Caryl Churchill’s ten-minute response to Israel’s invasion of Gaza. A painfully cryptic effort this. A handful of Jewish-looking characters discuss an unseen ‘her’ who must be placated, or suborned, or humoured (or something) with some sort of fabricated declaration. Banal, inconclusive, oblique to the point of obscurity and so decoupled from its subject as to be meaningless, this vain and flippant doodle is an insult to Gaza’s agonies. If that strip of hell merits our attention at all, it deserves better than this. Admission was free but we were invited to make the charity bucket tinkle on the way out. I declined, I’m afraid, fearful that Western generosity can be bartered into explosives more easily than our good natures credit.
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