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. A few wispy clouds are painted above a Manhattan skyline (featuring buildings designed in the 1990s) and two monstrous multistorey staircases of ashen metal lour over proceedings like wrecked spaceships. Everything has to happen on top of or within the skeletal digits of these whitened reticulations. I’ve never seen such pointless staircases. I left this horror show gasping for entertainment.
At the Old Vic Kevin Spacey’s latest production revives the great Darwin debate. Please God, not that (wilt, droop); do we have to? Oh, all right then. The play, written in 1955, dramatises a court case mounted 30 years earlier against a Tennessee school-master who taught evolution. This matters in America where the constitutional separation of Church and state is threatened when politicians pass laws insisting that teachers preach. Here it scarcely matters at all. But this tedious imported controversy is being fuelled by evangelists like Richard Dawkins, and energetically supported by gangs of teachers and politicians, even though the debate rests entirely on the false notion that the classroom is a child’s sole source of information and that newspapers, libraries, TV and the internet are incapable of spreading information.
I was taught creationism at school and I knew it was poppycock then just as I know Darwinism is poppycock now. (Look at a pictorial history of the development of industrial engines and you’ll see the inspiration for Darwin’s silly but enchanting fantasy of evolution.) What Genesis and Darwin have in common is a fairytale simplicity. Both accounts — and this applies to the Big Bang theory too — are readily intelligible by infants who are then encouraged to believe that the fable has been revealed by a mysterious authority which deserves the child’s reverence. Science and God have the same objective here, psychological coercion, the only difference lies in the details of the storyline. The contest between the theories isn’t a search for truth but a tussle for control of it. A power auction. Not surprisingly this play is thoughtlessly loyal to this season’s intellectual straitjacket. The Darwinians are presented as suave, nimble-witted sophisticates while the Christians are a herd of braying morons with popping-out eyes and scary beards.
Trevor Nunn’s lavish staging is best in its quieter moments. Limitless funds have hampered him and he sometimes crowds the stage with over three dozen actors. A garden party looks more like a food riot. Rob Howell’s set features a clunkingly literal depiction of the debate: receding cornices painted with the tentacles of an encroaching jungle. As the liberal defence lawyer, Kevin Spacey is on mesmerising form. Really, it’s hard to know how he manages to communicate infinitesimal nuances of sentiment and humour across the vast spaces of this mighty theatre. But I fear this play gravely weakens the evolutionists’ cause. By failing to give the Christians a single decent argument, and by pillorying them as a herd of emotionally stunted donkeys, the Darwin mob invite the charge of bigotry. The louder they assert the rightness of their theory the more I wonder if they really believe it.
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