Midsummer. Holidays loom. Migrations are being pondered and planned. Right now the English theatre-going middle classes are yearning for August, for Tuscany, for the pine-scented South, and for the sunbeds where they’ll sprawl and doze all summer smeared in perfumed lard and turning the colour of teak. Lovely. The West End is ready for these adjustments and from now until September it’ll provide what the British film industry has to supply all year round — cultural room-service for Americans. You start to wonder why Americans go abroad at all. Perhaps to discover how unadventurous they are, how closely they cleave to the known, the familiar, the homely.
This year’s lucrative game of catch-yank begins at the Novello with a Broadway import, The Drowsy Chaperone. This is a musical about musicals but don’t run for cover yet, it’s actually pretty good. The curtain rises on an effeminate loner sitting at home playing show-tunes on an ancient stereo. His favourite musical is a forgotten Twenties flop which uses every cliché known to drama. When he puts the disc on the turntable the show magically springs to life in his apartment. The plot, deliberately crass, involves a society wedding where the groom is a rich, brainless pin-up, the bride is a show-girl reluctant to retire, the chaperone is a drunken nympho and the villain is a Spanish cad who prowls the stage smoothing his moustache and looking for someone to seduce. After numerous identity confusions everything ends happily. Well, more or less.
The show’s great attraction is that it mercilessly satirises musicals whilst remaining utterly enchanted by their traditions. This blend of glossy exuberance and sly sophistication is an absolute winner. Bob Martin is charmingly vulnerable, and very funny, as the housebound saddo with more records than friends. Summer Strallen, a dazzling singer and a fabulous acrobat, brings a glimpse of heaven to the role of the bride but she isn’t quite the star of this show. Nor is Elaine Page who plays her tipplesome guardian with louche abandon. The honours go to Joseph Alessi as the sinuous, preening stud, Aldolpho, who loves the ladies nearly as much as he loves himself. The applause that greeted his curtain-call had the chandeliers tinkling in agreement. This is a wonderful piece of summer froth and its only fault is that it runs for 105 minutes without an interval.
At the Old Vic, more catch-yank. Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton is a service-able old thriller which has twice been filmed. Don’t spend too much time chewing over the plot, it’ll dissolve faster than milky cornflakes. Enjoy the atmosphere and the performances. Hayden Griffin’s design is nicely judged: the 1880 costumes are exquisitely stylish but the middle-class sitting room in which they’re displayed is oppressively cumbersome, brown and Victorian. You want to burn it down and rescue the clothes. Kenneth Cranham, on excellent form, brings all his twinkly dog-like humour to the role of Detective Rough, a retired copper trying to save poor bullied Bella from the clutches of her deranged spouse. Andrew Woodall’s control-freak husband starts off horribly unpleasant but gets more intriguing and likeable as the show progresses, and in the final act I found myself hoping his attempt to escape might succeed.
At the curtain call he was loudly hissed, and for a villain that’s a flattering result but it also tells you where this show is aimed: half an inch above panto level. Rosamund Pike, playing the duped wife, has taken another role that doesn’t require her to do much more than look gorgeous while sobbing into a bounder’s hankie. Her austere and sophisticated beauty may be limiting her career and I think she should try something risky, undignified and Joanna Lumley-esque. There may be a comedian lurking inside all that divine and disconcerting perfection.
Oladipo Agboluaje’s new comedy sets out to chronicle the seamy underbelly of Brixton at a time when gentrification threatens to kill it with blandness. This broad-brush portrait of the inner city boasts a rich cast of weirdos, wannabes, has-beens and never-weres. And though there are moments of great comedy the show is hampered by its panoramic ambitions. It’s less a play and more a municipal frieze where the characters sometimes make socio-economic observations aimed not at each other but at historians of the future. It’s entertaining enough but I hope that in his next play Agboluaje will return to his home turf as an irreverent commentator on the lives of losers. As for creating ‘chronicles’, leave that to museums, the mayor and other cultural morticians.
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