His brain clouded with opium fumes, Jean Cocteau wrote Les Parents Terribles in just one week. It opens like a Greek tragedy crossed with a madcap sitcom. The ageing beauty Yvonne prances around her Bohemian apartment pining and weeping for her son, Michael, who has gone missing. When he turns up safe and sound, she throws herself into ecstasies of relief, leads him to the chaise-longue and showers his face and lips with kisses.
He then breaks the news that he’s in love with a typist. She reacts like a cobra touched with a cattle prod. Spitting with anger she denounces the ‘lying hussy’, and vows never to let an intruder steal away her happiness and leave her to die neglected and unloved. These frenzied absurdities require a certain type of acting, and Frances Barber, who can play the toxic minx as well as anybody, brings all the broody passion, the reckless hysterics and the casual elegance that the role requires. She’s like the seven deadly sins dressed by Vivienne Westwood. And, despite her venomous sermonising and her monstrous egoism, she remains very firmly within the bounds of one’s sympathy. It’s a stunning and constantly hilarious display.
The plot develops when Yvonne’s sister, Leo, an icy and methodical realist, steps in and arranges for the new girlfriend to meet all the family, including Michael’s put-upon father George, a deluded scientist. The plot twists and writhes at this point and becomes more traditionally farcical. We learn that the girlfriend, Madeleine, has recently extricated herself from an affair with a madcap inventor. This turns out to be George. So a new love-triangle has to bump corners with the first.
Clearly the opium available in Paris in 1938 was of the very strongest grade but the play that emerged from Cocteau’s narco-odyssey can’t meet the same high standards. The structure creaks a lot and the characters don’t cohere. George makes sense as a bullied ninny who potters about in his workshop all day. But he has another life as an adulterous sex-athlete who conquers luscious young beauties for fun. These two peas don’t belong in the same pod. The motives of the calculating Leo (played with poised detachment by Sylvestra Le Touzel) keep changing in order to generate another scene’s worth of action. And the greatest fault is that Frances Barber’s Yvonne fades from centre stage, where her agonised furies and salty posturings were such fun to watch, and is made to serve out the play’s second half at the fringes of the action.
A week off the drugs and Cocteau might have mended these shortcomings and given more substance to the cartoon Clytemnestra, whose titanic jealousies are the play’s best asset. Director Chris Rolls has produced a highly entertaining version of a script that will never be more than a flawed curiosity. And top marks to Andrew D. Edwards for his glittering glass-and-marble set, which manages to suggest Trump Tower extravagance in the low-ceilinged bomb shelter of the Trafalgar Studio 2. And a tip to playwrights. If you need stimulation, try coffee.
I arrived 30 minutes early for Jack and the Beanstalk at the Hackney Empire, so I took my four-year-old son and one of his terrorist associates to use up a few spare minutes at the nearby Hackney Museum. They raced all over the exhibits screaming and shouting and chanting with such savagery that the curator, using a tactful sequence of glances and smiles, made it plain that the meditative serenity of her realm might benefit from their immediate removal.
Installed in their seats in the Empire, they were cowed into silence by the unfamiliar hugeness of the theatre. So the show began. And as the music pealed out and the vibrant scenery glowed beneath the lights, the reformed rioters beside me maintained a watchful reticence. They refused to boo the baddies or join in the singing or greet the Snowman or scream for Silly Billy or call out ‘he’s-behind-you’ when the cow sidled unobserved across the stage. ‘Is it finished?’ they whispered at the end of every scene. And when Clive Rowe, the ever-brilliant dame, flung sweets into the gallery neither of my little hooligans would even raise a paw to catch them.
At the interval they crept from their seats and demanded to be taken back to the museum. Where all hell broke loose. The saintly curator endured ten further minutes of mayhem which ended in tears when I broke the news that the panto was only half-finished. No power on earth could have got them back into the theatre. But next day they both chattered about it non-stop and did impersonations of Jack, the Snowman, Silly Billy and Clive Rowe. Great panto. I just didn’t realise it at the time.
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