Review Twilight Song

Twilight Song
by Kevin Elyot

Ah! Sweet Mystery Of Life
https://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Twilight Song, written by the late Kevin Elyot in 2014 just before his death, is an odd little playwriting confection about some odd fellows and a woman. 

Analyse it closely and it turns out to be a tawdry tale of impregnation, loans, property, possible professional fraud, furtive sexual encounters, time slippages and blackmail, all wrapped  in colourful tissue paper and tied with a great big ribbon bow.

We can't begin to add up all the self-consciously theatrical and cinematic styles it seems to go through - there's a touch of Rattigan, definitely some Noel Coward and Alfred Hitchcock, even a snippet of Christopher Isherwood, Charles Dickens and DH Lawrence (or is it EM Foster ...?) and, hey, is that Monty Python parody?

This is the première of Elyot's last play and, despite some sluggish moments, director Anthony Banks gives us a stylish production set on James Cotterill's wooden round stage living room with a settee, curved French windows, mahogany gramophone and a silver drinks' trolley to create a Scotch haze. 

It's a slickly, but rather mechanically, put together play and it rather feels as if the playwright put together the themes going around  rather than a deeply-felt piece. 

Maybe it was intended to go a bit deeper into the gay influence on literature, film and television and what this meant before and after 1967 legislation, yet this never really develops, even in metaphor.  

Still, after a slow and rather stilted beginning, the story does take hold. Barry (Paul Higgins) is a middle-aged gay retired pharmacist who lives with his mother in a North London Victorian villa. While she takes her regular weekly trip to Kent, he invites an estate agent (Adam Garcia) to give a valuation and other services. 

Centred on the house, this modern day encounter slips back to the 1960s and delicate girlish bride Isabella (Bryony Hannah) welcoming two old codgers into her marital home. 

Charles (Hugh Ross), an elderly doctor and seemingly someone's uncle. Harry (Philip Bretherton), a dodgy married solicitor, like Charles, seems well lodged in his current comfortable middle-class existence even if it seems the two men have a past. 

Slipping back and forth in time, by the end we can piece together the story and obtain a sense of an ending but, while it may have been meant as a satire or parody, it comes across as a rather lacklustre playwriting effort.

References to Conservative but pro Welfare State prime minister MacMillan and 1960s emigration to Australia are flagged up as well as a wife's thwarted career.

However, in the end it feels as if we've been lured to spy through the keyhole at a rather insubstantial and too self-satisfied mystery story and it's an amber light. 

Review The Roundabout

The Roundabout

By JB Priestley

A Day In The Country

http://www.parktheatre.co.uk/

Watching the rare revival of this 1931 play, a naughty thought crossed the mind of TLT. What if JB Priestlley, Oscar Wilde  (from beyond the grave), Bernard Shaw and Kaufman and Hart,  the latter probably by wire across the Atlantic, had got together and decided to write a piece for the stage as if one playwright and as a game of consequences?

For that's exactly what the plot and dialogue felt for us in this drawing room comedy, written originally for actress Peggy Ashcroft during a short-lived love affair with Priestley. Ashcroft passed on it and a subsequent production was mounted in Liverpool.

It's a strange, uneven script, given a solid production directed by Hugh Ross at Finsbury Park's Park Theatre, with an oddly mechanically zingy aphoristic feel, where the characters are vastly stronger than the plot. 

Aristocrat and financier Lord Kettlewell (Brian Protheroe), although maintaining a substantial country house household, is insolvent and trying to reduce costs by discarding his mistress Hilda Lancicort (Carol Starks).

In the midst of his travails, he is ambushed by the arrival of his long-lost daughter Pamela (Bessie Carter), from whom, along with her mother Rose (Lisa Bowerman), he has been estranged for many years. 

Pamela has arrived after a trip to the Soviet Union, bringing with her fellow communist Staggles (Steven Blakeley) whose tough ideological stance disguises a rather more illegitimate appreciation of capitalist wine and women. 

An appreciation which oversteps the mark when he presses his unwanted attentions on the pretty maidservant Alice (Annie Jackson), behaving more like a licentious eighteenth century nobleman than then adherent of an austere cause  bringing equality to the masses.

The frailest of plots has a set simply but effectively indicating a Tudor-style mansion with overarching beams (designer:Polly Sullivan). But couched somewhere beneath it all is an a subtext dwelling on shifts in power - from painting and theatre to the mechanised medium of film, from silent movies to sound, the failure of the Soviet ideal, international politics alongside economic woes.  

All entangled as Parsons the butler (Derek Hutchinson), who has his own run of good luck cruelly snatched away, drunkenly observes, "in a shtate of gre-aet social confusion".

Nevertheless there's an oddly self conscious feel to the shifts as well in style and tone in the writing. While jolie laide Pamela pushes the plot along, the mournfully humorous leftover of imperial Edwardian Britain, down-at-heel idler Churton Saunders (Hugo Sachs) is like a silent movie character with a clear view but bypassed by events, but still tolerated on a small stipend on the studio lot. 

Meantime the inpecunious widowed Lady Knightsbridge (Richenda Carey) shows an imperiously focussed saleswoman manner in drumming up business for her family with her own take on political events: "Communists, eh? Is there any money in it, because I'm looking for something for Agatha's younger girl - dreadfully plain, poor thing!".

Maybe the play was caught halfway between theatre and cinema and its own push between agitprop and entertainment. 

Comrade Staggles, a character in Blakeley's performance still with a decidedly modern if caricatural feel in our times, ostensibly talks about the bloated capitalist classes when we know Lord Kettlewell is on his uppers. 

But Staggles could just as well to be talking about the fake life of luxury portrayed on the big screen, "this rich, artificial sort of life, where you're eating and drinking all day, and all the women are parading their sexual charms." 

So, a bit of a curio in the Priestley canon in a production which sometimes still has to find its rhythm but with strong enough characterisations and performances to carry it through to the upper ranges of an amber light.