Gasping for entertainment

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Theatre Royal Haymarket

Inherit the Wind
Old Vic

‘What do you want?’ a film producer asks Holly Golightly about half an hour into Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but if I find out I’ll tell you first.’ At this point my hopes for the evening collapsed. Rule one of the characterisation manual states that a character who wants nothing, or nothing much, isn’t a dramatic personality but a list of utterances enfolding an emptiness.

In this adaptation of Truman Capote’s wartime novella, Holly comes across as a camp fantasy, a popsicle of pretentious egoism floating around New York being adored by wealthy fools, fantasising about stealing diamonds and delivering the sort of polished inanities only fictional characters speak. There’s a romance buried somewhere in the script but it’s badly botched. Three potential lovers present themselves, a frosty Brazilian, a fat rich Nazi and a penniless, spineless writer. Take your pick. Populating a play with tedious ghouls and requiring them to compete for a stick of gilded bubblegum causes terrible problems for the audience. There’s no one to root for. One’s loyalty is disengaged. The most powerful sentiment rising in the breast is befuddled irritation. Of course, one is supposed to sympathise with the rejected scribbler but he’s so hopelessly smitten with ‘Holly G’ (as she likes to call herself) and she’s so crashingly self-absorbed that it’s like watching a spotlight trying to seduce a glitter-ball. Without a proper plot the play has to survive, like a courtesan, on charm and physical allure.

Anna Friel does a fine job incarnating the Golightly vacuum. The rest of the cast are unobjectionable. The costumes are fabulous, the men in crisply stylish suits, the girls in big-bowed frocks. The set aims for debonair visual grace with amazing clumsiness.