Leave well alone

Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a moss-encrusted tombstone. Interesting choice. And inside the mausoleum there’s a new version of an ancient war film by Powell and Pressburger. I love the opening premise of this movie but I’m less keen on the rest of it. A doomed airman falls in love with a radio-controller just as she’s attempting to steer his plane to safety. ‘I love you, June,’ he gushes; ‘you’re life and I’m leaving you.’ Gripping stuff. Memorable dialogue, too. ‘He’d fly that kite through soup to drop the cabbage.’ But the script doesn’t know what to do with its bravura set-up, and after an initial burst of energy it plops back to earth like a dud V2 and settles into a sequence of vapid, stilted and discursive scenes.

Tristan Sturrock is suitably peppy and earnest as Peter, the death-defying airman. Delightful Lyndsey Marshal, as June, manages to look fantastically sexy in a set of ratty beige wartime undies, a style of hosiery which on its own could probably have terminated human life on these islands, never mind the Luftwaffe.

The trouble with this romantic fantasy is that the script constantly reaches for the very quality the Olivier’s vast stage is utterly resistant to — intimacy. You could land a Chinook inside this theatre. All Peter wants to land is June. The cosiness problem is dealt with in two ways. Diversion and camouflage. First, diversion.