Easy listening

The Prisoner of Second Avenue
Vaudeville, until 25 September

Lingua Franca
Finborough, until 7 August

Neil Simon has received more nominations from Oscar and Tony than any other dramatist in history, so his comedies ought to be playing constantly in London. But revivals of his plays are rarities. Something of the Simonian essence seems to fall off the plane mid-Atlantic. Perhaps it’s the awareness that we’ve seen his favourite terrain, bourgeois anguish, charted more vividly and tellingly by homegrown talents. Simon’s conception of human character is fundamentally soppy. More trickster than magician, he builds his drama by postulating secure, loving relationships and smothering them in frothy layers of petty bickering.

This succeeds in maintaining our interest because the characters’ cordiality never alienates us, but it never challenges us, either. He’s not a searcher but a comforter. He hasn’t the caustic graces of Mike Leigh nor the heaven-sent scattiness of Alan Bennett nor Tom Stoppard’s super-intelligent curiosity. His dialogue reaches constantly for one effect, quickfire self-lacerating petulance, which is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go very far.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue is set in New York during the 1971 recession. There’s no plot. Mel loses his job at an ad agency and with the help of his adoring wife Edna he muddles through somehow. That’s it. Mel may be a lousy adman but he’s a champion whiner. After ten years of analysis his therapist has died and he’s disinclined to find a replacement. ‘I’d have to spend $23,000 filling in the new one on all the things I spent $23,000 telling the old one.’ Many of Simon’s jokes originate in arithmetic. The couple’s flat is burgled and Mel refuses to make a claim because his insurance premiums will rise.