Ingredient X
Royal Court, until 19 June
Canary
Hampstead, until 12 June
In the old days the Royal Court knew that the best way to entertain local millionaires was to stage plays that wallowed in distress and squalor and featured four crack addicts in a squat stabbing each other to death with infected needles. Things changed under Dominic Cooke, who introduced a lighter touch and brought wit, intelligence and a sense of fun to the theatre. But nostalgia is back. The Court has revived its crack-house quartet formula in Nick Grosso’s new play, Ingredient X.
The setting is a London high-rise. There’s no plot. The action concerts the attempts of two characters to overcome their enthusiasm for alcohol and powders while the other two booze merrily away. Each character has the same double defect: nothing to say and all day to say it. Lesley Sharp plays an interfering Cockney mega-gob whose best friend is an overweight, rum-soaked halfwit from south Wales. These characters are presented with some energy and conviction.
The other two are more of a challenge to the cast. Katie, a stroppy, pea-brained tart, is played by the sophisticated and beautiful Indira Varma, who charmed the West End last year in Michael Grandage’s Twelfth Night. Here she attempts to turn herself into a tower-block mum with the IQ of a dolphin. It’s an ambitious transformation. Her accent sets off stylishly in the direction of Whitechapel Road but soon packs it in and nips back to Bond Street to pick up some cut-glass vowels. Her partner Frank is played by James Lance, an assured interpreter of Hooray Henrys, whose vocal instrument has the same homesick longings as Varma’s. His accent originates in Westminster and pays the occasional visit to the East End, not unlike the Queen Mother, in order to demonstrate that its owner has integrity.
Faulty casting and fake enunciation are indicative of the play’s reality deficit. It’s hard to believe this is a snapshot of contemporary London when it looks more like a clique of chortling posh kids slumming it in order to refresh the sensation of privilege by a pleasing act comparison. The play begins with a free-form dance routine performed with gusto and not a little self-admiration by the cast and it ends with one of the gang methodically cleaning the entire flat. This takes five minutes and feels like five decades. Neither flourish adds anything but tedium to the show but both reinforce the impression that the producers are convinced that the play is a priceless source of entertainment and vitality. Sadly, it isn’t.
The talent prophets once assured a glittering future for Nick Grosso and his contemporary, Jonathan Harvey. That future is now and I’m not entirely dazzled. Harvey is still best known as the author of the camp sitcom Gimme Gimme Gimme, whose preening and petulant atmosphere left me rather cold. His new play, Canary, sets out to be a documentary history of the gay British experience from 1962 to the present. It also wants to be a powerful, issue-rich family drama. The knotty storyline concerns a bisexual copper who conceals a gay affair in order to advance his career, produces a gay son, refuses to acknowledge the son’s sexuality even after he contracts Aids, and is haunted by the memory of his former lover who is accused of murdering the psychiatrist who tried to cure his homosexuality with jolts of electricity. Get all that? Don’t worry. The complexities have been assembled with meticulous care so that the drama can examine the polygonal facets of gay prejudice during each of the last five decades.
But the interlocking symmetries are too neat to be believable. Even the opening dilemma doesn’t ring true. The top cop faces ruin when his 48-year-old love affair is exposed. But gay bobbies are pitied and revered these days. A senior officer who admitted to a John Gielgud moment in the 1960s wouldn’t be hounded from office. He’d get a promotion, a book deal and a peerage.
The play has the feeling of a state-of-the-nation TV project that got decommissioned and ended up falling into many pieces on the subsidised stage. It’s bitty, bitty, bitty. Half-forgotten icons like Mary Whitehouse are brought on and pelted with scorn. It’s hard to imagine a weaker target than extinct bigotry. Mrs Thatcher is treated to a few light titters as well. Impersonated with subtle brilliance by Paula Wilcox, Mrs T is seen studying the text of an Aids awareness campaign and finding certain phrases objectionable. ‘I don’t like anal intercourse,’ says the Lady with a straight face. As in all the best Thatcher gags, she didn’t see the funny side.
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