Review The Tailor-Made Man

The story of a once-famous star relegated to obscurity by the Hollywood studios fascinates Tim Gopsill. 

The Tailor-Made Man 
by Claudio Macor

Down And Out And Proud In Hollywood
https://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/

Showbiz sleaze is much in the spotlight at the moment but puritanical Hollywood is seen from a less well-known angle in this production of Claudio Macor’s play The Tailor-Made Man.

It’s the true, surprisingly little-heard of, story of William “Billy” Haines, a silent screen idol who successfully bridged both the silents and the talkies in his career.

However,  he would not stay silent about his love life. He was openly gay, rejected the option of a "lavender marriage" and his sexuality led to his movie career downfall.

Yet Billy, played by Mitchell Hunt, with real verve, is hardly portrayed as a victim, but an engaging and appealing individualist who, in spite of his blacklisting, careered his joyful way through life.

He made a new life for himself with his lifelong partner Jimmie Shields. Theirs was a true love story, for despite Billy's habit of picking up sailors  – the supposed cause of his blacklisting -- the couple remained devoted to the end.

The play is structured around a series of flashbacks with Tom Berkeley as Jimmie telling the intriguing tale of their life together to a movie camera, as if being interviewed. 

Each of these flashbacks is preceded by the clapperboard call of “action!” and ends with “cut!” bellowed through a megaphone before the final “it’s a wrap!”,

At first a novelty, these quickly become gratuitous, increasingly irritating punctuations as the two-act play goes on, as if we hadn’t noticed it was about the movie business.

The story is strong and the play could be consistently very enjoyable. Hunt's portrayal of the film star Haines is compelling.
 
Rachel Knowles also turns in two believable performances, doubling up as enchanting but shrewd Hollywood stars, Pola Negri and Carole Lombard, with a keen sense of the absurd, sending up the whole situation.

The characters each may totter around like ditzy celebrities in gold lamé, martinis in hand, but they offer real support and friendship to the boys when they are in trouble.

At the outset Billy is accused being “lip-lazy", not being animated enough as he mimes speech during his performance for silent film.

However, there is a sharp poignancy when another famous actress Marion Davies, played by Yvonne Lawlor, during the filming of a movie scene talks affectionately to Haines about his real life rather than following the lines.

Indeed,  the play covers the golden age of silent movies and Brian Hodgson’s direction picks up superficially the flickers' style but overdoes it with extravagant gesturing and face-pulling.

In addition the male support roles don't weave the same magic as the female actors and Hunt as Haines.

Berkeley's slightly gauche Jimmie  doesn't convince. Dean Harris also lacks gravitas and menace as the great movie mogul Louis B Mayer, who hires and fires Billy, with no punch in the famous one-liners.

Edwin Flay as his PR and fixer Howard Strickling is dull and flat, giving little impression of how he could have possibly got newspaper editors to bend to Mayer’s will.

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating, well-written play, not about injustice but the triumph of love in overcoming it.

There are hints about well-known gay stars who never came out and endured years of misery, forced to feign a bogus heterosexuality. This story is the antidote. It’s heartening and fun, but the production needs considerable tightening up and it's an amber light.

Review James Bonney MP

A play seemingly in the right place at the right time to unpick left wing politics and give some sorely-needed laughs disappoints reviewer Peter Barker

James Bonney MP
by Ian Buckley

Events, Dear Boy, Events
http://whitebeartheatre.co.uk/ 

A week is a long time in politics and the current unexpectedly strengthened position of  Labour's leader with squirming volte faces of previously naysaying Labour politicans has been a wonder to behold.

So James Bonney MP seemed full of potential for a playwright willing to grasp the mettle, do the research and mine his material. However Ian Buckley's new play seems stuck in the last century in terms of scenarios with no attempt to really grapple with current or perennial political issues.

James Bonney (Andrew Loudon) is a careerist Labour MP, a Blairite of the sort we now all know is an anathema to most old Labourites and new Corbynistas.

He has a wife Christine (Karen McCaffrey) and daughter Kate (Elian West), a curvy blonde secretary Jennifer (Louise Tyler), and a suited and booted fixer as his agent George (Malcolm Jeffries), for whom the phrase éminence grise seems apt.

Bonney's daughter also just happens to be in love with a constituency activist Malcolm (Ciaran Lonsdale) who is opposed to everything Bonney stands for.

Predictably the male MP is bonking his female blonde secretary, his previously trusting wife finds out, the éminence grise plays his cards close to his chest, the activist gets his girl but not before finding political temptation hard to resist.

Philandering Bonney gets his comeuppance. And the blonde personal assistant? Oh, yes she only - I roll my eyes at this point - gets pregnant.

That leaves the wife.

She gets angry.

It's a pale shadow of a Ray Cooney sex farce (think of Two Into One which was revived at the Menier in early 2014).

The design by Oscar Selfridge is made up principally of different doors, moved around the set to create new spaces, as well as entrances and exits. However these are not used for comic effect - there's a distinct lack of laughs and wit throughout, as well as satiric edge.

While playwright Ian Buckley describes the Labour Party as a "strange beast" and self-identifies as a  left-winger, whatever that means now, his political analysis is undercooked and his digs at the political set up lily-livered.

Indeed,  this play's personality reminded me of the SDP in the 1980s, the ill-fated Labour breakaway  -- it has a weak left jab, even weaker narrative and appears to have no real purpose other than to damage the Labour Party.

Bonney is never more than a one-dimensional New Labour MP, a type which naïve idealists might believe in - if they ignored the reality of making politics.

We've seen all the other characters before and better done. The loyal daughter torn between her father and her lover; the upright activist; the House of Cards Machiavelli; the wronged wife; the busty secretary.

There's nothing dividing it from any other limp traditional farce because it inflexibly fails to grasp its chance to examine the institutional Labour Party and the contortions and compromises of recent times.

The play references the failed coup against Jeremy Corbyn but not the general election, so it's painfully behind the times. Like it or not, any playwright worth his or her salt would have had to update the script, even if it meant a late rewrite.

This is especially true when the theme takes a well-worn path. There have been plenty of stage and screen incarnations of MPs stretching back to the last century.

The Nearly Man was created and written in the 1970s by Arthur  Hopcraft who also successfully adapted John Le Carre's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for television. It chronicles the political and domestic life of a talented middle-class Labour MP,  the dilemmas and intricacies of the political scene and is well worth hunting down.

Director of James Bonney MP Georgia Leanne Harris makes the most of lacklustre material and has some nice tricks. The play even informally starts before the lights go down, with Bonney greeting audience members for instance.

However nothing can disguise the thin material which seems to have no inkling of truly pitting ideology against realpolitik.
 
Truth to tell, the left has often dominated playwriting and much popular comedy since the second half of the last century. When political comedy and satire wallpaper the media, with comedians like Mark Thomas and Mark Steele producing angry satire and drawing blood, a political farce really needs to know its stuff.

James Bonney MP is neither a classic farce nor a political satire and a gap in the market still exists for a really coruscating play about the state we're in. In the meantime, it's a red light.