Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Novello
The Stefan Golaszewski Plays
Bush
Revolutionary republics, like the USA and Soviet Russia, never really get rid of royalty. They just appoint surrogates. America’s yearning for icons has accorded the actor James Earl Jones a rank somewhere between Richard the Lionheart and John the Baptist. The producers of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof approached him on bended knee (‘You don’t audition James Earl Jones,’ gushed one) and begged for the royal assent. Good King James was probably giggling behind his hand as he boomed out an affirmation with the famous Darth Vader rumble. I bet he was thrilled to smithereens to be offered a lead role on Broadway as he approached his 80th year. His voice is a marvel. If it were a beauty spot it would teem with artists and photographers trying to immortalise its rocky complexities and echoing caverns, its bosky resonances and foresty groves. But it’s not a national park. It’s just a voice. And when it arrived on stage, accompanied by its aging guardian, it drew a feverish round of applause that disguised a hint of anxiety that London might not love what Broadway had adored. Earl Jones, thank goodness, has both the presence and the stagecraft to match the gift of nature he carries with him. He embraces the role of Big Daddy like a debt owed for many decades. He begins as an angry, self-regarding monster, bullying his sons, shrieking at his daughters-in-law, lashing out at his wife with everything except his fists. Only in the second act does his humanity shine through and the complexities of his overbearing personality acquire shape, substance and pathos. Adrian Lester, as his tortured son Brick, performs similar acrobatics.
Lester is one of those actors who is watchable even when the odds are stacked against him. In the first act he plays a cold, sullen and quite frankly rather tedious sourpuss who necks whisky by the bucketful and reacts to his luscious wife with the three magic words, ‘Take a lover.’ Yet it’s a compelling and often extremely funny portrait of frozen rage. In act two, drawn out of himself by his doting, if doubting, father he faces up to his latent homosexuality. The towering performances of Earl Jones and Lester bind the production together and easily compensate for some perfunctory efforts in the minor roles.
Derek Griffiths adds wonderful comic touches as an embarrassed pastor and Nina Sosanya bristles with steely conviction as Mae, the exquisitely bitchy sister-in-law. The producers are keen to advertise this as the play’s first all-black production. Oh, blimey. The self-righteous brothers are back. Today we’re all going to say sorry to tomorrow for yesterday. And hang on. Expiating the wrongs of segregation with a further act of segregation doesn’t quite satisfy logic. Never mind. The true star here is the script, one of the great achievements of 20th-century drama. Not a slice of theatre, a slice of life. I emerged from this captivating production in raptures, having seen something rare and magnificent, a glimpse through a tiny fissure into a radiant parallel universe, where the forces of existence burn more richly, sweetly and horribly than here.
To the Bush for a pair of monologues by rising TV comic Stefan Golaszewski. His pet subject, thwarted romance, is a fertile source of humour but with so many masters in the workshop is there room for another apprentice? Instinct tells him to copy Woody Allen and he keeps insisting he’s painfully shy and spectacularly ugly. With Woody we could see that the joker knew what he was joking about. But Golaszewski is handsome, sturdily built and brimming with self-confidence. He’s doing bald gags with a full head of hair. And though he’s discovered an amusing strain of rhapsodic bashfulness he can’t move beyond it. Is he a good jokesmith? He texts a potential girlfriend. ‘Am crrntly sittg on my bed staring @the c ling. I no how 2 hav fun.’ Then comes an ironic footnote. ‘I spent a while on that. Basically it shows I’m bloody funny.’
On stage, he’s certainly charming. In fact, his charm is so self-evident that he’s spotted it himself. I think it might become his hobby. Some reviewers have found a rewarding mixture of lyricism, pain and dark humour in these scripts. I can see that, yes, but I just didn’t get it. He uses the same structural trick twice: a quirky, freewheeling romance is destroyed by an emotional earthquake. Little things irritated me. In the first script the girl is called Betty. In the second, Pudding. As one romance fails, he comments, ‘It would be magnificent if I never thought of her again.’ That’s not a lover speaking. That’s an obsessive, a UFO-spotter, a Diana-fanatic who doesn’t know how to stop himself tethering teddy bears to the railings of Kensington Palace.
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