Literary juggler

Afterlife
Lyttelton

Dickens Unplugged

Comedy

Afterlife is pH-neutral. It doesn’t enhance Michael Frayn’s reputation and doesn’t damage it either. Max Reinhardt was one of the great theatrical magicians of the 20th century and it’s easy to see what drew Frayn and his long-standing collaborator, the director Michael Blakemore, to the challenge of putting his life on stage. The result is a grand, beautiful, finely acted and richly imaginative show. One snag. Frayn shouldn’t have written it. Reinhardt is now almost forgotten so first up you need some plain-speaking nuts-and-bolts data entry. Who is he, where’s he from, what did he do? But Frayn the literary juggler wants to create a multilayered text spilling with intellectual delights so he starts the show opaquely with a play within a play. You get hints about the location (1920s Germany) but you need to refer to the programme notes every minute or two to keep abreast.

In the lead role Roger Allam does his Cowardly Lion routine, busy, silly, sympathetic, heavily gestural. You get touches of pathos, touches of humour and that’s all. Touches. You notice but you don’t feel. That’s not Allam’s fault. The characterisation of Reinhardt keeps tripping over another of Frayn’s conceptual blunders. He shows Reinhardt as a figure so besotted with his work that he’s incapable of ordinary human relationships. So where are the conflicts? How can you personify tensions between a director and his packed diary, or between an artist and his obligation to art? The sources of friction are abstract and can’t live or breathe on stage. Reinhardt comes across as a theatrical electron, full of mobility but entirely elusive.

Then there’s Reinhardt’s work itself. He specialised in fabulously lavish settings of classic plays sometimes using a cast of 300, with 1,700 different costumes.