Well
Apollo
Hit Me! The Life and Rhymes of Ian Dury
Leicester Square
In Blood: The Bacchae
Arcola
So what does the theatre critic make of the recession? No one’s asked me, actually, so here goes. Leaving aside the obsessive 24-hour media coverage, there’s little trace of it in the real world. Immunise your bonce against the gloom-rites of the newspapers and you’ll see that the impending ‘slump’ (dimple, actually) will prove to be the briefest and shallowest downturn in economic history. By next Christmas the factories will be pumping out skiploads of new consumer junk, the FTSE will be performing dizzying feats of alpinism at the 6,000 mark and the present media-orchestrated collective trance will have become a distant memory. How do I know? I’m in the West End a lot and I’ve never seen it so busy. Indigenous spendaholic Britons are being joined by bargain-grabbers from Europe and Russia and there are plenty of well-tailored, absurdly over-polite Americans too. (Why are they so polite? It seems rather tactless of them to vex a savage people with displays of superior manners.) The visitors are drawn by sterling’s elegant swallow-dive on the currency markets and the attendant opportunity to snap up million-quid apartments at half price. Wise heads in the West End have noted the American influx and the Yank-traps are being trundled into place. At the Apollo there’s a gigglesome weepie written by Michigan stand-up, Lisa Kron.
The play’s title, Well, has not been chosen well. Though it draws attention to the main theme, sickness, it’s such a frictionless little syllable that it tends to slither irretrievably through the cushions of the mind. The play examines the troubled relationship between a lifelong hypochondriac (Sarah Miles) and her daughter (Natalie Casey). Having beaten a series of crippling allergies, the daughter finds it impossible to comprehend and forgive her mother’s chair-ridden frailty. Casey’s performance is poised and full of deft comic touches. And Sarah Miles, with large twinkling eyes, golden hair and a costume of exquisite pale silk, languishes in her sitting-room very decorously like a hand-gilded Victorian china tea-pot. But the play’s most notable feature is its convention-bending technique which Kron has lifted wholesale, and without improvement, from Woody Allen’s one-act masterpiece, God. The actors regularly break character and comment on the storyline as it develops. In Woody’s brilliant short play this novelty is refreshing and hilarious but without his non-stop inventiveness the trick soon drags. If actors tell you they’re not acting any more you know perfectly well they still are. So they’re asking you to buy two pretences not none. It’s hard work. Kron gives her play a wry comic varnish but beneath the crust there’s lots of earnest melodramatic emotion here which irritates rather than entertains. My advice is leave Well alone.
Hit Me!, a transfer from Edinburgh, is an Ian Dury tribute show bolted on to a biographical drama. Hardcore fans, at whom this is aimed, will already know the oddities of Dury’s life. Though he sounded pure Hackney he was brought up in Harrow, the son of a bus driver and an Anglo-Irish heiress. He contracted polio at the age of seven in a Southend swimming-pool having been conveyed there in a Rolls Royce. With his ravaged looks and curdled voice, Adrian Schiller vividly captures the lunatic merriment of Dury’s spirit and the peculiar grace with which he handled his broken body. And Josh Darcy is exquisitely seedy as Fred, the foul-mouthed roadie who treated Dury with disgusted adoration.
At the Arcola in Dalston there’s a muddled but spirited folk-tale set in Brazil in the 1920s. The supposed parallels with the Bacchae are hard to detect and the first-time author Frances Viner mishandles the exposition. The meat of the story involves the enmity between Besouro, a charismatic hoodlum, and Gordilho, the police chief who murdered Besouro’s prostitute mum. Some of the dialogue is pleasingly insane. ‘Besouro’s just walked into the police station to claim his guitar.’ ‘Book him.’ ‘On what charge?’ ‘Taking the piss.’ The all-male troupe are talented, perhaps overly so, and director Noah Birksted-Breen wants to put all their theatricality on display. The show keeps stopping so that the chaps can play a burst of jungle music or use their acrobatic skills to demonstrate one of the universal truths of mime: four men somersaulting across stage in slow motion amounts to very little.
The show’s star, Greg Hicks, is not just a considerable talent but a great one. Imagine Simon Russell Beale with sex appeal. Quite how he wound up playing the underwritten role of Gordilho in this pumped-up piece of street theatre is anyone’s guess.
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