I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to.
The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a hotel room watching TV in mid-afternoon. He’s a spent vaudeville star whose feud with his comedy partner forced him into retirement 11 years earlier. His nephew, a pushy young agent, wants to revive the famous duo for one last TV special. DeVito insists that he won’t do it. (But he will, of course.)
The corny script unfolds exactly as I remember it from the 1975 film, which I was dragged to at the age of 12, and which starred an overexcited Walter Matthau and a partially mummified George Burns. Some old git in my family thought these old gits would be a hoot. They weren’t. But now, as I close in on old-git territory myself, I begin to see the draw. I understand! The frothy, knockabout script disguises a subtle and moving meditation on ageing, on loss and on the curiously addictive nature of love-hate friendships.
Simon’s writing isn’t quotable. It has few amphibious qualities. Extract a line from its native habitat and it expires on the spot. His great knack is to harmonise absurd humour with realism, and to create comedy and melancholy simultaneously. The closing scene shows the old foes reconciled (sort of), slumping in chairs, and exchanging funeral news and doctors’ notes about their advancing ailments.
Your trouble is your blood doesn’t circulate, says one. It does, comes the response, but not to the right places.
If that doesn’t make you laugh, you have no soul. Or you’re 12 years old. This fast-lick production by Thea Sharrock is wonderfully dowdy. The main set is a 1970s hotel room that boasts no features from the 1970s. Spot-on. It hasn’t been decorated for 20 years. The lead is played by Danny DeVito who has a lot of presence for a man who could fit into a haversack. His comic persona — the pop-eyed, raspy-voiced Rumpelstiltskin — is filled out with layers of feeling and pathos. Beneath the bluster of a washed-up ego lurks a decent guy, a fragile, yearning, lonely old clown.
Richard Griffiths, as his partner, gives a very muted, very generous second-fiddle performance. Never mind the weird American accent, Griffiths adds sombreness and a sort of majesty, too. Though not petite by any means, he moves around the stage with the distracted grace of an old elephant who’s missed the graveyard and is heading back to the watering-hole. Together the pair are exquisite. Tickets aren’t cheap but this is definitely a blue-chip buy.
At the Cottesloe we’re off to the suburbs for a comedy of manners by Lisa D’Amour, a Steppenwolf favourite and Pulitzer nominee. Two couples are having a barbie. Mary and Ben are solid, easily shockable types. Sharon and Kenny, both pretty flaky, are recovering addicts who met in rehab. All four are anxious, small-minded and desperate to impress. Result: a small-town scene that fizzes with comic embarrassment. Hilarious stuff. But the play has nowhere to go from here.
The friendships get rowdier and zanier, but emptier at the same time, less credible, less engaging. The problem is this: real-life people visit the suburbs to socialise. Playwrights visit the suburbs to satirise. Real people want fun. Writers want vengeance. And this shifts our sympathy in the wrong direction. Rather than feeling contempt for these back-patio bumpkins I wanted to wrap a protective arm around them and tell Lisa D’Amour to get lost and pick on someone worthier of her sophisticated disdain.
Still, a technically flawed play provides useful lessons for apprentice writers. Here, by my reckoning, are D’Amour’s biggest boobs. Her stagecraft is repetitive. She concludes two scenes with the breaking of furniture and two more with a sudden foot injury. Her script has no interval, so the drama is missing that crucial day-night rhythm: the culmination, the pause and the reawakening. And she delivers a cop-out ending with a messenger walking on to reveal that Someone Was Pretending To Be Someone They Weren’t.
Strong performances can’t save this callow show. Justine Mitchell crackles with energy as Mary, the slightly hysterical ditz. Clare Dunne is equally powerful as Sharon, the slightly less hysterical ditz. Stuart McQuarrie neatly captures Ben, the businessman with a shameful secret. And Will Adamsdale is excellent as Kenny, the warehouseman with a shameful secret. Er, right. I’ve just spotted another boob. The characters are a bit interchangeable. Forget Detroit. Save up for The Sunshine Boys.
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