Marital infidelity

Serenading Louie
Donmar, until 27 March

Measure for Measure
Almeida, until 10 April

Genius detectors, busy in America, want us to meet the playwright Lanford Wilson. He hasn’t made much impact here possibly because his talent is so vast it can’t be hauled across the Atlantic. His 1970s play Serenading Louie focuses on marital infidelity in the suburbs, and English audiences are entitled to make comparisons with our home-grown chroniclers of bourgeois disenchantment. Wilson doesn’t stand much chance, I’m afraid. His static, pain-strewn narrative has none of the fun or sparkle of English suburban drama. And where Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, Alan Ayckbourn and Mike Leigh could manage one good line every couple of minutes, Wilson manages one every hour. ‘Love,’ says a maudlin cuckold, ‘is a neurosis we agree to have together.’ A frosty wife reflects on early encounters with her husband. ‘Actually I didn’t love him then. But I love him then now.’ No one could fault the sincerity of this handsome and skilfully acted production but the script is a wordy, disappointing dud.

Over to the Almeida where Michael Attenborough’s production of Measure for Measure opens with prog-rock visual detailing. The palace in Vienna boasts darkly opulent tables, chunky chandeliers and thrones carved with knobbly finials. When the duke appears, sheathed head to toe in a velvet wizard’s robe, the impression of Ozzy Osbourne’s rumpus room is complete. But the duke’s lieutenants seem to have wandered in from other shows altogether. Escalus is dressed like Henry Higgins in an Edwardian frock-coat. Angelo seems to be kitted out for a David Lodge campus comedy in his donnish tweeds, ginger beard and with a pair of spectacles which he swaps for contact lenses. Could this sartorial vacillation be a subtle dig at Shakespeare, who wrote this play without deciding whether it was a tragedy or a comedy, or who the main character should be?

The plot starts off being silly and then becomes completely daft.