The Rise and Fall of Little Voice
Vaudeville
Life is a Dream
Donmar
Midnight in a northern slum. The pubs have closed and a boozy, blousy, past-it single mum is trying to seduce a handsome young talent scout. He deters her advances until he hears her teenage daughter, alone in her bedroom, singing jazz classics. The girl is an undiscovered star who can impersonate all the great 20th-century divas, Ella, Edith, Shirley, Dusty, Lulu. The talent scout decides to launch her career and prise her from the clutches of her bullying, drunken mother. Jim Cartwright’s 1992 play is an ingenious comic update of Cinderella. From the producer’s point of view it’s supremely difficult to revive. The title role requires a young actress with fab looks, strong acting skills and a vocal range sufficiently well developed for her to mimic great singers at the height of their powers.
Diana Vickers, a wannabe plucked from The X Factor, has been blessed with the required box of tricks and her starry performance had the stalls leaping and cheering like football hooligans. Lesley Sharp as the hideous, alcoholic mum seems to be exorcising all kinds of demons. Just occasionally she veers into caricature, as if she’s having so much fun playing the toxic matriarch that she doesn’t care if anyone else is having fun watching her. Subtler and more furtively skilful is Marc Warren as the seedy talent scout, who shimmies through the role like a cobra in a gold medallion, and there’s strong support from Rachel Lumberg as the mother’s harassed sidekick, Sadie. Amazingly, one of the smaller roles is played by an actor with the same name as the author, James Cartwright. Even more amazingly he’s the writer’s son. Imagine the rejoicing in the rehearsal room when that coincidence was discovered.
It’s the sort of thing that might happen in Life is a Dream, a mythic fantasy written in 1635 by Philip IV’s court dramatist, Pedro Calderón. What a bombastic turgid relic this is. The storyline is about as easy to disentangle as the arterial system of an octopus. I managed to grasp two wriggling strands: there’s a special sword whose owner has significant ancestry and there’s a prince called Segismundo who’s been imprisoned since birth, presumably to save him from being bullied for having a silly name. After four decades in custody, Segismundo is restored to the palace where he charms the court by wittily throwing a footman out of a window. Later he’s re-imprisoned and informed that the palace episode was a dream. Further impenetrable complexities follow. Punch-ups, clinches, bad rhyming couplets, speeches of Kinnockian density and some kind of ketchup-soaked coup d’état towards the end. If Philip IV thought this was entertainment, then thank God he’s not around today. He’d be running the Arts Council.
During one of the many lingering longueurs I set my thumbs to ‘twiddle’ and idly totted up those spectators taking the play’s dream theme too seriously. I spotted three sleepers, not including my neighbour, whose slack chin kept declining moistly on to my shoulder. After two hours of windy posturing and a few rifle shots all the characters are reconciled and the story ends with marriages. Well, ‘story’. It’s more like a Barbara Cartland novel written by Hans Christian Andersen on drugs.
The big attraction is that Segismundo is played by Dominic West, star of The Wire, an American cop show admired by everyone except the millions who couldn’t get past Episode Three, ‘Yet More Atmospheric Frowning at the Baltimore Police Department’. Can West act? Well, he can smoulder, he can prance about, he can pucker his brows suggestively and he can do a very good cackle of princely disdain. But acting doesn’t really come into it. Segismundo is a dog of a lead. The character spends most of the play thinking he’s asleep and because he isn’t functioning under normal human conditions he can’t engage our sympathy. West is watchable; he’s learned his lines; the girls like him. That’s all I can say.
His opposite number, wasted in this lightweight wreck, is the most striking performer in British theatre, Kate Fleetwood. Aside from the grace and naturalism of her acting, her greatest asset is her look. Broad, pale, high-cheeked and with troubled deep-set eyes, her face is not entirely feminine, a little like the Sphinx, a little like Dietrich too. It seems to have been worked on by some maverick car designer, full of mysterious alignments and improbable symmetries, hard curves and soft angles. She won rave reviews for her terrifying performance as Lady Macbeth opposite Patrick Stewart, and it’s amazing to see her towering abilities reduced to this hallucinogenic pantomime. Even more startling is that her CV still includes Holby City. Yes, flipping Holby. Hollywood would be more like it. What’s she doing here? Get on a plane, woman, and crush them to powder with your talent.
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