Once
upon a time in the West End, the star-part of a play
was almost a genre in itself. Playwrights often wrote
them for spouses: Marion Lorne, Constance Cummings,
Hugh Williams. The trouble is that nowadays you need a
little intellectual weight, and preferably social
concern, to flesh out the glamour. To give your
leading man and whoever is doing the leading lady the
chance to preen as Noël Coward
and Gertrude Lawrence they have to be unemployed
theatre buffs living in a dream world.
So, in the theatre where the Master gave a
celebrated prompt from his stage-box on the opening
night of Hay Fever and fumed when Gingold and
Baddeley went a bit too far in Fallen Angels,
Ian McKellen and Janet Suzman now play a brother and
sister in a Peckham basement rehearsing a Cowardish
play, supposedly dictated by Sir Noël
from the grave, with champagne bottles full of
supermarket ginger ale. He was a teacher,
she is an actress (“the definitive Nina if only it had
come to town”) who dropped out of a knighted
thespian’s company and now visits his Belgravia pad to
pleasure him while he recites Prospero. Whereas
Boy and Babe, for such these children are called,
defend the theatre as “magical entertainment”, Sir
(Nigel Davenport) has marched into the video-taped
theatre market and, along with all the old disdain for
television that the Ivy must have been hearing for
decades, attaches no special importance to the great
classical roles or the theatre in general.
Sean Mathias, the author, is an actor and how much
it shows in this nostalgia for something that many of
us love, but not in this way. That, however, is as
much point as the play has; that and the related
interplay between theatrical fantasy and the reality
of meeting fellow-actors in the dole queue, shopping
trips pilfering sardines, even an attempt to carry
into Private Lives the squalid world of
incontinent old women and a paraplegic squashed by a
bus in his wheelchair. Though briefly
fuelled by the interest of Sir’s presence on the Arts
Council and his influential voice on whether Boy’s
play Public Death (Coward is clearly recycling
titles for present use) might be selected for the
Kennington Festival, the action, like the
protagonists, is all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Knowing references abound: Janet Suzman enters
drawling about her divorce from Victor and Maudie’s
marvellous party, and “on a very clear day you can see
Victoria Station” scores double for bouncing off a
Coward anecdote as well as the line in Hay Fever
that it relates to. Miss Suzman, and how
loyal of her to take the part, gets periodic nervous
confrontations, the unfunniest funny story of the year
(about the Queen falling into a pond) and a
dryly-played finale when she puts on a Beethoven tape
and smothers Mr McKellen Desdemona-style. He,
on his side, gets a don’t leave me pathos bit, a
nervous breakdown or two, a cigarette holder and some
pastiche Coward songs by clever Martin Duncan which
are good enough to get away with.
Anthony Page gets the director’s billing and the
question: Why?