Cast

Alcoholism is no joke.  Even the traditional farcical treatment of a father rolling home dead drunk on pay day fails to raise a proper laugh these days.  But some of life's tragedies are best brought home through comedy. To do it successfully takes style and Neil Simon has got that. His sharp, observant wit has you roaring with laughter even as you want to cry for Evy (Sheila Steaful) a singer who fell victim to drink and has just undergone “the cure”.

She returns to her New York flat to stand in the ruins of her life.  She needs friends, but all she has got is a lover who treats her shabbily and two friends who are faithful but, in their own misspent lives, as wretched as she: Jimmy (Peter Bourke), the middle-aged homosexual actor, who kids himself he has talent and gets emotionally flattened with every rejection, and the girlfriend Toby (Sandra Dickinson) who spent the adult part of her 40 years trying to please men by her looks and “femininity”. These three tie each other up completely in knots of neuroses and confusion.  Evy’s only hope and real support comes from her level-headed 17-year-old daughter Polly (Zoe Nathenson).

This is a situation comedy whose sparse setting creates the atmosphere and which has no real plot.  The script is wonderfully witty and meaningful and the delivery is a sharp. This is a play for the eighties (written in 1970!) and a sharp start to a season at the Palace. Sheila Steafel uses both body and soul to portray the cynical vulnerability of Evy.  Her timing in delivering Neil Simon's lines is spot on with passages between her and Polly every bit as funny as those of Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Odd Couple. Sandra Dickinson has a peach of a role as the woman who believes her best friend is her powder compact and who looks at herself in the mirror with the devastating thought that “underneath all this is my mother”.  Her monologue describing her life as one long string of lovers and an unfaithful husband is hilariously pathetic.

Lou Stein directs with feeling for the Bronx and with that very special humour of the self-effacing American.  It is a tricky play to keep alive on stage and there were times when a little more use of hands, even moving objects or fiddling with a pencil, might have sharpened a scene.  But on the whole this is a powerful, crisp little comedy with a bittersweet taste that lingers.