A Thousand Stars Explode in the Sky
Lyric, Hammersmith, until 5 June
Counting the Ways
Oval House
The Lyric theatre in Hammersmith has an eccentric approach to the dearth of writing talent. Unable to find a good playwright, it has commissioned three bad ones to showcase their talentlessness in a single work. One assumes that the three men were jesting when they described their collaborative method as ‘writing scenes on rolls of wallpaper and passing one pen between us’. Or maybe they were being candid. The play is flawed at every level. Narratively, the script is so dense that the drama can never achieve lift-off. Four brothers must meet and be reconciled before the fifth brother, suffering from cancer, expires. That’s plenty of material there but the committee has added a cosmic event that will terminate life on planet Earth in two weeks’ time. Rather surprisingly, despite the advent of Armageddon, the country functions perfectly normally. The trains, the currency, the media and the government keep ticking over as if nothing much was up. When the cataclysm occurs, the family gathers on a hillside and some lightbulbs go on. That’s about it.
The characters are a collection of self-pitying autists and soup-brained posers. Their dialogue is a mixture of whimsy and white noise. ‘Exeter’s boring but I love swans,’ says someone for some reason. ‘I wonder what it’s like to be gassed to death at Birkenau,’ ponders another. At times the conversation climbs an Everest of polished improbability. ‘This family is behaving like a colony of flabbergasted penguins,’ says a precocious teenager. A murderess begins her confession with, ‘I had an altercation with a man defecating on the perfume counter at Selfridges.’ Some of these word-events jab surprised laughter from the audience, but it’s the hilarity of shock and disbelief, not of warmth and honesty. It’s like being kicked, not tickled.
One wonders what the Lyric is up to. They hire a trio of halfwits to scribble a plotless muddle. They load it with a cast of 11 under-used actors. They strand them in an ugly, ramshackle set backlit with glaring headlamps that bore into the audience’s eyeballs like a Gestapo interrogation. And they’re incapable of hiring a star who might bring in a crowd, partly because they disdain to run the theatre as a profit-making concern when the more aristocratic option of running it as a Byzantine flop is available to them, and partly because no star would lend his name to this cascade of lexical trivialities written by a panel of inadequates. (Incidentally, the Lyric has 550 seats while the Bush Theatre, down the road, has just 60 and attracts actors of the calibre of Joseph Fiennes.) Poor Hammersmith. Its theatre is behaving with the presumptuous and parochial self-importance of a family that’s been on benefits for five generations. Still, hey ho. It’s not as if cuts are on the way or anything.
At the Oval House there’s a version of Counting the Ways, a lesser-known examination of love and betrayal by Edward Albee. This isn’t classic Albee but the production is done with charm and imagination and the director has slipped in a few Nick Clegg references to add a sense of upbeat topicality. For those with hearing difficulties, the cast perform the script in British sign language during the action. It’s amazing that this invaluable skill hasn’t made it on to the national curriculum. Signing isn’t just handy for communicating in nightclubs and war zones, it’s the ideal way to swap caustic observations about the food while your host is in the kitchen. So if your signing’s a little rusty this is as good a place as any to go for a refresher. Thumbs-up.
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