Enjoy
Gielgud
Entertaining Mr Sloane
Trafalgar Studio
A View from the Bridge
Duke of York’s
How does he get away with it? The main target of Alan Bennett’s 1980 comedy Enjoy is disability. Ageing Connie has pre-senile dementia and her husband Wilf is partially paralysed and prone to blackouts. Their condemned terraced house is about to be flattened by their progressive council who’ve sent in a sociologist to record the slum-dwellers’ behaviour for posterity. Shaken from their habitual indolence, Connie and Wilf blunder about the house bickering ignorantly while the mute observer takes notes. Bennett’s game-plan here seems to be to mock penniless, narrow-minded, crippled northerners for the amusement of affluent, sophisticated, able-bodied southerners yet he manages to avoid opprobrium — partly because his writing has an indefinable charm and partly because southerners wrongly identify his genteel Leeds accent as working-class and assume that these characters are his peers, when in fact they’re from the class beneath him.
Great floes of Bennettian whimsy cascade through the script. Sweden is described as ‘the place where they commit suicide and the king rides a bicycle’. ‘My mother,’ says Connie, ‘suffered from memory loss. I think.’ When Wilf collapses, apparently dead, a neighbour takes his pulse. ‘If he has gone we’ve only just missed him.’ This is good fun, in a rather weightless and limited way, a verdict which stands for the show as a whole. There are minor structural flaws: an unbelievable second-act plot twist and a ten-minute coda which could do with trimming. Alison Steadman is on great form and brings a lovely cheeky warmth and affection to Connie, a role played in the original production by Joan Plowright. Larry came to the dress rehearsal and declared it the best play he had ever seen. ‘I knew then it would be a disaster,’ Bennett recalls. At the time its failure hurt him so much that he withdrew from the stage for over a decade.
Joe Orton, too, specialised in garrulous, crackpot, middle-aged ladies and the wistful, sex-starved Kath is the centrepiece of Entertaining Mr Sloane. This is the nastiest and least ‘comic’ of Orton’s major plays and having seen it immediately after Enjoy I was struck by its daring, maturity and sourness. There’s no hint of Bennett’s verbal origami and cosy escapism. Orton’s world view is both utterly cynical and miraculously refreshing. It must be the honesty. Sloane, a handsome bisexual drifter, bewitches both Kath and her latently gay brother Ed but ends up as the victim of the sexual ménage.
Nick Bagnall’s absolutely tip-top production is distinguished by two dazzling performances. Imelda Staunton gives substance and sympathy to the needy, confused character of Kath and deftly carries off the comedy without ever making her seem merely sad or silly. Simon Paisley Day, as Ed, turns in yet another bravura display. If you don’t know him, ladies and gentlemen, the man is a star. See anything he’s in. He has the dashing fervour and the manic athleticism of a pre-paunch John Cleese. His favourite manouevre, which he pulls off here once again, is to outperform everyone else on stage without appearing to ‘hog it’. Mathew Horne, from various TV comedies, is fine, if somewhat muted, as Sloane. He gets the menace all right but not enough of the louche predatory sexual swagger. I was tempted to call him ‘lazy’ but I decided not to. Well, not quite. And a word of warning. Horne has a large teenage following who assume that a night at the theatre equals a night watching telly. There was an iPod shishing and jishing behind me throughout. I’d have complained but I wasn’t wearing my stab-vest.
The expected disappointment of A View from the Bridge never materialised. Thank God. This is one of the great plays. The title alone has a strange magic. Its poise, its banality, its suggestiveness.
Lindsay Posner has pulled off a thrilling revival. Christopher Oram’s seedy set is so grim-encrusted it almost smells. Ken Stott, who has the most powerful voice I’ve ever heard in a theatre, is a ferocious bull of an Eddie and his grip on the part, and on our horrified fascination, never falters. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, glammed down as his ashen-faced wife, gives a quietly mesmerising performance and provides the emotional hinge on which the action turns. The real star is the script. Street talk heightened into a rugged and almost timeless prose that still feels like street talk. ‘Plenty days I walk hungry in this city.’ A phrase taken virtually at random from the play and one which might be the opening line of a classic novel.
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