Review I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard

The British première of a whipsmart, brutal play set in a New York apartment fascinates Francis Beckett with its lacerating dissection of a father-daughter relationship.  

I'm Gonna Pray For You So Hard 
by Halley Feiffer

Portrait Of The Artist As A Raving Egotist
http://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

A young American actress, excited and hopeful after opening in a new show, comes home with her famous playwright father, and they consume a lot of drink and a lot of drugs; and he takes out the disappointments and resentments of his own life by manipulating a daughter who hero-worships him.

That’s pretty much it, really, but it adds up to an evening in the theatre which leaves you angry and emotionally drained.

The father is a man of his time, and his time is the late fifties and the sixties, so he has all the self-indulgence of that most indulged generation, plus the sort of sexual obsession that seems to grip many American men of a certain age. If he wants to be insulting about another man, he calls him a queer or speculates that his sexual organ may not be large. Dicks and pussies figure large in his discourse.

His cultural references are those of his generation, such as Death of a Salesman, but there is underlying bitterness that he never achieved the same status as the likes of Arthur Miller.  He has told his daughter his stories of triumph and near-triumph many times, but she still listens agog – and he sulks when she remembers the punch line.

He is mean about small things. She needs a cigarette and has run out; he has one alight, but refuses her because there is only one left in his packet. He teases her about her reviews, and cheers her with more drink and more drugs. He tells her “you gotta learn to drink like an adult” as he drinks like a spoilt child.

He says he loves his daughter, and in his own way he does. Would he still love her if she failed to make it as an actress, she wants to know.  Well, yes, but he’d be really disappointed. And “your mother getting ill is the best thing that could have happened to us” – for she might have got in the way.

In short, the man is such a complete shit that, despite Adrian Lukis’s best efforts in the part (and Mr Lukis’s best efforts are very good), I for one could not give a damn what happened to him.

The daughter is another matter. Jill Winternitz gives a stunning performance, believable and heart-rending from start to finish.  She is what her character wants to be – an exceptionally talented actor of star quality. We pray for her character to escape the clutches of her domineering, manipulative father, until she does, and – without giving away the end – it is not what we hoped for.

A fine play, well acted and thoughtfully directed by Jake Smith, is well worth the trek to the Finborough and earns a green light.

Review Orson's Shadow

Orson’s Shadow 

by Austin Pendleton

From an idea of Judith Auberjonois 

Suitable Lives For Treatment 

www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk 

After a disastrous theatre run of his Shakespeare adaptation Chimes At Midnight, Orson Welles rolls into London in 1960 to direct Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright at The Royal Court.  Olivier himself is in the midst of a marriage break up with troubled film star wife Vivien Leigh and about to leave her for his young co-star. 

Welles, while hating the play, absurdist French drama Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, is lured by the chance to work with Olivier and raise his profile to find finance for his movie pitches from either the Eastern bloc or the Middle East. Instead the collaboration is mired in acrimony and pettiness with Olivier going behind the exasperated Welles's back, giving directorial notes to the cast.

Austin Pendleton, who acted with Welles in Catch 22 (see 2m 31s), fleshed out this little-known episode with some artistic liberties in 2000 and turned it into a well-received backstage play Orson’s Shadow. Now it receives its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse directed by Alice Hamilton.

Set at a time when television was starting to take hold and just before the onset of new stars growing up with film rather than theatre or radio, this Cold War piece captures the moment of ageing stars caught adrift.

A middle aged Welles (John Hodgkinson) with Falstaffian girth, unresponsive to diet pills as he gulps down multiple steaks, tries to discard his reputation as a one-hit wonder with Citizen Kane. Olivier (Adrian Lukis)  flushed with his success in Angry Young Man John Osborne’s Suez play The Entertainer, albeit harking back to a past age of music hall,  is about to found the National Theatre with enfant terrible Marxist theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennet). 

Indeed the travails of Welles and Olivier seem to be presented mostly through the filter of Tynan as narrator, with a soupçon of unreliability, portrayed as a fixer. 

Both rhinoceroses in their own way, the lumberingly obese yet sure-footed Welles and the scheming yet insecure Olivier cross swords. Pendleton also inserts into the mix Olivier’s lover, Joan Plowright (Louise Ford), a straightforward personality of the new acting generation standing her ground between the rivals.

Meanwhile exotic Vivien Leigh (Gina Bellman) floats in like some spirit conjured up by both Tynan’s malevolent yet grudgingly admiring imagination and Olivier’s Svengali impulses. Add to this, a fictional Irish stagehand Sean (Ciaran O’Brien).

Infused with wry humour and a mash up of acting styles from melodrama to naturalism with a gallop through playwriting history,  this ambitious production can be interesting but is also uneven. Despite Tynan’s naturalistic ironic commentary played against the deliberate staginess of the first act, there is a sense of self conscious exposition and name dropping.

The interlacing of acting styles, character and back story finds more purpose in the second act, when Tynan, despite himself,  is sucked into the action and the reason for the play’s title brought into focus. An amber light from TLT and automotive companion.