Review I Loved Lucy

A play about a television icon makes Francis Beckett ponder on the cult of celebrity nostalgia infecting current playwriting.  

I Loved Lucy
By Lee Tannen

After The Ball Is Over
https://artstheatrewestend.co.uk/

Younger theatregoers start here. I Love Lucy was a 1950s' American sitcom which was also shown here starring Lucille Ball and her first husband Desi Arnaz.

The series was fast and funny and established Ball as one of the earliest great female comics.  Children used to badger their parents to be allowed to stay up and watch it.  (I speak on this with authority.)

In the late seventies, when Lucille was in her late sixties, she met a young man in his twenties called Lee Tannen, distantly related to her second husband, who had grown up hero-worshipping her.

He was her friend for most of the last ten years of her life, and he has now written this two-hander play about that friendship.

The best thing about the evening is a wonderful performance by Sandra Dickinson who spits out her lines in just the way I imagine Lucille in old age would have done.

Lee is played with great assurance by Matthew Scott, but he is hampered by having very little to work with.

We learn early on that he is a gay, neurotic Jewish New Yorker and an unsuccessful writer. For the rest, his devotion to Lucille has to substitute for character and, directed by Anthony Biggs, Mr Scott does well to make that even remotely convincing, obliged as he is to tell us frequently, in slightly different ways, how wonderful she is.

The story goes like this. Lee meets Lucy, is overawed, but manages to forge a strong friendship with her. She takes him to parties and first nights, but mostly they play backgammon, and talk, and occasionally what they say is quite funny.

At the end of Act One they fall out, and at the start of Act Two they make it up again. And at the end of Act Two (normally reviewers do not reveal the denouement, but in this case I don’t think I will spoil anyone’s enjoyment) she dies.

That’s it, really, except that after she dies the author seems to remember a few things he wanted to say about what a great genius she was that he hasn’t squeezed in earlier, and detains us for another ten minutes or so while he says them.

There seems to be a growing view in London theatre that if your central character is a famous actor, you need only recount what happened and you can call it theatre.

I’ve seen a couple of shows recently that appear to have been written on that premise, and I don’t buy it.

I need a plot to hold my attention or, at least, an overarching theme or some clever and unexpected insights; and if none are present, then I need a lot of very funny lines.

Mr Tannen doesn't offer any of these things. There are a few good lines, but not enough of them, and  they are not good enough.

“What did the doctor say to the midget? I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a little patient” is about as good as it gets, unless you prefer “Lucy loved Oprah when Oprah still had a last name.”

I’ll stretch to an amber light on the basis that it’s always a pleasure to watch top class actors at work.

Review The Last Ones

Set in Tsarist Russia, a frenzied tragifarce by a celebrated playwright disappoints Peter Barker in its British première.  

The Last Ones
by Maxim Gorky
Translated by Cathy Porter

Children Of The Revolution
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Written while Russian playwright Maxim Gorky was in exile in 1908, The Last Ones now receives a very uneven first UK production at the Jermyn Street Theatre.

Gorky himself characterised the events in the play, banned in Russia for its portrayal of the tsarist police,  as a "tragic sideshow"

In the Jermyn Street version, Gorky's grotesque melodrama unfortunately slides into an unconvincing family drama filled with a series of overwrought scenes. Seeming to walk in the shoes of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg in its painful dissection of family life, its near hysteria and bloated tally of characters work greatly against it.

This mixture of tragedy and farce is set in the turmoil following the 1905 Russian Revolution when corrupt police chief Ivan Kolomiitsev is sacked, then reinstated, in the wake of the revolution, the chaotic aftermath of which includes an attempt to assasinate him.

There is some good news about this production. As the dislodged police chief and overbearing and charmless father Kolomitsev, Daragh O’Malley is deliciously villainous and thuggish.

Sonya, his wife, played by Louise Gold, also holds it together, while all around her the disarray of what appears to be a clumsy script overwhelms the action.

Nevertheless, the supporting cast includes very able actors.

Tim Woodward is  nicely restrained as Komitsev's brother whose wealth payrolls everyone. Maroussia Frank gives a well-pitched performance as the calm family nurse, Fedosia. David Burt is the urbane Dr Lesch, channelling the suavity of a Claude Rains in Casablanca.

The play is definitely grounded in the events post the first Russian Revolution. Yet the radio snippets broadcast to the audience before the play starts and after the interval confusingly seem to mash up The Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

There is also a lumpen attempt to add contemporary relevance by dropping Donald Trump on top of the play with an extract from one of his speeches.

Kolomitsev’s tiresome five children -- all at various stages of young adulthood -- are played by actors who are bright as a button and word-perfect. However what maybe should be searing melodrama (Tennessee Williams comes to mind) and hyper-theatricality only comes across as over acting.

Again, there is a confusing mash up as they speak with English home counties' plum-in-the-mouth accents while the parents have completely different accents. There are also lavish helpings of ham as the family falls apart faster than the Conservative Party majority. It seems amazing that the Kolomiitsev family with all its fractures and flaws didn't fall apart years before.

Director Anthony Biggs, who has done some very fine work during his Jermyn Street tenure, in this case marshalls his troupe like a First World War general  - over the top. The overall impression left is of a tiny stage filled to the brim with a wailing, weeping, distraught cast of a dozen actors.

Maybe this play could work in another production but this appeared to be a solid cast of actors struggling with intractable material and it's a regretful red light.

Review The Autumn Garden

The Autumn Garden
by Lillian Hellman

Sweethearts and Scoundrels
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

On a trip to Alabama, TLT recalls a memorable tour of antebellum mansions on the Gulf Coast where a genteel Daughter of The American Revolution evoked times past. Including the institutionalised prostitution (which crossed the racial divide) of which the sons of the leading families partook, practically as an obligation, from an early age.

The Autumn Garden, first produced in 1951, deftly combines the secrets and scandals of life in the American Southern states, national and international politics and Hollywood in a deceptively languid piece by Alabama-born Lillian Hellman, also a former Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) script reader and a Hollywood screenwriter.

In fact, despite the recorded Chekovian inspiration and obvious similarity with fellow southerner Tennessee Williams, it struck us an American Terence Rattigan might be an apt comparison in Anthony Biggs' s production which, by the end, packs a definite punch.

Set in 1949, the owner of one of those Gulf Coast antebellum mansions which has seen better days, Constance (Hilary MacLean), has sold her family's New Orleans' town house on the death of her parents and attempts to resolve a debt-ridden estate.

She has been reduced to running the family's holiday home as a summer boarding house. with the help of black factotum Leon (Salim Sai), dependent on the family's circle of friends for guests.

Now she nervously awaits the return of an old beau, glib artist Nick Denery (Mark Healy)  with his wife Nina (Madalena Alberto), from Paris with their German maid (Leonie Schliesing) where he apparently spent the Second World War fairly comfortably under Nazi occupation.

Meanwhile, also staying as guests are a distinguished Boston-born member of the military, General Benjamin Briggs (Tom Mannion), who seems ready to embrace a new progressive order and is estranged from his ditzy movie-going southern belle wife Rose (Lucy Akhurst) and their two grown up sons.

Constance, at a time the European continent had become dependent on American Marshall Aid, has taken in her seemingly demure French niece Sophie (Madeleine Millar), daughter of her dead brother Sam and a French seamstress.

Sophie has come to a business like arrangement to marry young bachelor Frederic Ellis (Sam Coulson) who has literary aspirations and a substantial allowance from his grandmother (Susan Porrett), via his mother Carrie (Gretchen Egolf). Also on the guest register is hard-drinking banker Ned Crossman (Mark Aiken) whom Denery confuses with his brother Willy and whose love for Constance has now become a jaded memory.
       
The Autumn Garden is surpassed in fame by Hellman's two other plays Little Foxes in which former MGM star Elizabeth Taylor made her stage debut in 1981, and The Children's Hour.

Despite an effective set of faded glory designed by Gregor Donnelly, it struck us that maybe it was written as a movie, or even a soap for radio or that brash relative newcomer on the media scene, television. Still there is plenty of stagecraft, and the ensemble all give fluent and precise performances.

Once the second act gets underway, the previous hints about Hollywood politics and cover-ups become more explicit yet the Chekovian story of unrequited love and lives in the American South remains undimmed and stands on its own account.

Hellman herself was, to say the least, a divisive character. Once she, Showboat star Paul Robeson and Death of A Salesman playwright Arthur Miller were grouped together as radicals. She and lover Dashiell Hammett refused to name names to the House of UnAmerican Activities (unlike, for example, MGM actor Robert Taylor),  but she later irretrievably tainted her copybook.

In the public perception she remained a seemingly unreconstructed defender of Stalin, spouting falsehoods in a novel and movie she insisted was a partial factual memoir (even if Tom Stoppard, amongst others, has questioned the nature of literary memoirs in his recently revived Travesties), exposing herself in an undignified spat when she accused a fellow novelist of slandering her as "a liar" on a TV chat show and fell into the hands of lawyers just before her death.

Yet, as Biggs implies in the programme notes, whatever her mendacious literary and monetary manoeuvring, her reputation could well have suffered, with her skill as a writer downplayed, because she was a woman who played a man's game but was not tolerated as a man would be.

Just as Hellman's own reputation can be simple or complex, subject to the motivations of those portraying her, so The Autumn Garden is skilfully constructed, a simple tale of the South or a multifaceted piece. An amber/green light for a worthwhile  and careful revival.

Review I've Been Here Before

I've Been Here Before
by J B Priestley

For The Children
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/show/i-have-been-here-before/

A famous searingly prescient newspaper cartoon of 1919 by Will Dyson shows statesmen leaving the Versailles Peace Conference after the First World War turning towards a naked infant weeping behind a pillar, by the child the peace treaty discarded on the floor. Above the innocent toddler reads a sign. "1940 Class".

This came to mind watching J B Priestley's I've Been Here Before. In 1937 when this play was first performed (with performances still needing the permission of the Lord Chamberlain) people had been there before.

And indeed the time travelling play is an impassioned plea, in retrospect in vain, to intervene and take control of destiny before it was too late.

Director Anthony Biggs orchestrates a crisp, carefully-thought-out production at the bijou Jermyn Street Theatre.

The fuel driving this play is the anguish over attempts to mitigate  the era's wars, economic woes and subsequent unspeakable cruelties with academic theory and expediency. Far from adhering slavishly to a theory of predestination, in the play's final act there is a fervent appeal to break away from the predicted unhappy endings. 

Set in hostelry, The Black Bull, on the Yorkshire Moors, a German refugee, a former science professor (Edward Halsted), without the international prestige of an Einstein,  at first finds no room at the inn.

However ambushed by cancellations over the Whitsun weekend, the landlord (Keith Parry) and his widowed daughter (Vicky Binns), already lodging the headmaster (lantern-jawed Daniel Souter) of a recently founded school for bright local boys,  find themselves taking in not only the Professor but  a local businessman (David Schaal), a school benefactor,  and his young wife (Alexandra Dowling).

At the time refugees could even be deported back to continental Europe from Britain. Fascist regimes were taking over Spain and Italy and the National Socialists consolidating in Germany.

This raised trade and stock exchange issues with new partnerships and alliances construed in the play as a love affair and elopement, suicide and intervention also taking on double meanings.

And the landlord's grandson with a scholarship to the boarding school could be said to be of the 1940 class. Mention of experimentation, starvation and drug testing are more explicit.

Firmly anchored in its time, I've Been Here Before is given an admirably straightfoward production with precise, clearly defined performances from the whole cast.

This precision is also reflected in the ingeniously simple but effective design by Cherry Truluck and Alberta Jones.

The pale blue stage is curved like half of a planetary ring, with several audience seats in the middle.The placing of the furniture into different positions after each of the two intervals completes the illusion of a revolving orbit and passing time. With blue, gray and lavender costuming, all in all, it's an elegant production.

Priestley was a playwright and political activist whose skill, using a fashionable theory of time as a vehicle, in bringing forward facts and conclusions otherwise unpalatable to British audiences and those in authority cannot be underestimated.

Despite its mystical overlay, it struck TLT as having someting in common with the events of Noël Coward's Still Life, the basis for the movie Brief Encouner,  or Terence Rattigan's later The Browning Version, couching seismic upheavals in a domestic framework.
 
I've Been Here Before is an intricate literary attempt to avert the fate laid out for the 1940 class. Yet it is still imbued with sadness and awareness of the political reality as a failing British Empire government wavered and blinded itself, falling back on an aristocratic parochial piecemeal parish structure. A green light.
.

Review I Loved Lucy

I Loved Lucy

by Lee Tannen

Queen of Comedy

http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Back in the day TLT faintly recalls as a tot enjoying the slapstick in reruns of sitcom I Love Lucy. It was part of the strange glamour mingled with down-to-earth accessibility of Americana seeping on to British commercial TV. 

And for TLT it had a kindred spirit in the copies of "Jack and Jill" TLT'S great aunt (her grandmother's sister-in-law) sent over from New York with one particularly memorable story of the little boy who despaired of needing nerdy glasses until he saw a native American Red Indian chieftain in full headdress wearing - yes! - a pair of spectacles. 

But enough of TLT!

For this is a review of I Loved Lucy, an American play, written by and based on Lee Tannen's memoir of his father's cousin's wife's brother's wife, Lucille Ball.

Tannen presents himself as tongue-tied fan, an escort of, a backgammon player with, bathed in the aura of, estranged from and finally reconciled with the redheaded icon and TV pioneer in this canter through the years between 1960 and her death in 1989.

After the opening strains of Frank Sinatra singing "How Little We Know" drift away, theatre ad copywriter Tannen creates a world where sitcom and life merge together in a portrait of the actress filtered through the character of - er -   Lee Tannen. 

The stage Lee is played by an expressive Matthew Bunn in a clever hall of mirrors' script reflecting on a celebrity in the family, the nature of fandom and the need to earn a living. The stage Tannen may have aspired to the character played in the 1950s by William Holden in Sunset Boulevard  but he slips by tiny increments towards King of Comedy's 1980s' Rupert Pupkin.    

Meanwhile Sandra Dickinson's more deliberately naturalistic performance as the star of sitcom and sponsorship herself in her last years is a true revelation. She inhabits the tracksuits and personality of the model turned Hollywood B-actress turned everybody's favourite sitcom wife and mom as if a tailor-made role for her.  

We can take what Lucille's sidekick says about her at face value or we can read between the lines. Or we can value what Lucille says about herself. Especially when for a moment she grasps the narration from Lee and guides the play in a new direction near its denouement.

All of which is staged with skilful understatement by director Anthony Biggs. Matched too by the equally skilful set design of Gregor Donnelly backing the two players with large three dimensional letters - L-U-C-Y - filled with black and white press cuttings. A heart, which also graced I Love Lucy's opening credits, doubles up as a suspended screen for evocative images of Lucille and her entourage. 

Yep, we loved this Lucy - a carefully crafted play written with heart and something to impart, meticulously acted and directed. 

And TLT has even managed to find a connection between Jack and Jill and I Love Lucy. 

An early contributor to the kids' magazine was Pearl S Buck who also wrote The Good Earth, turned into a movie filmed by cameraman Karl Freund whom Lucille's then husband Desi Arnaz brought in to film the innovative recordings of I Love Lucy for their Desilu production company. 

Even if  apparently as Lucy Ricardo in I Love Lucy she didn't always deliver the pizza at the right moment for the bosses, a green light for a play which delivers the goods