Lloyd Evans
Already a subscriber? Log in
The central character, Carla, is a pregnant widow whose husband has been killed in Vietnam. He was a violent, whore-hiring brute, apparently, but Carla misses him so badly she consoles herself by supping back gallons of neat vodka. Her boozy woes are compounded by her domestic obligations. Her hyperactive 12-year-old son, Thor, likes to play Led Zeppelin albums at full volume while she dozes on the sofa in a vodka fug. And she’s tormented by her mother-in-law, Grace, an autocratic nuisance who gets her kicks by preventing everyone else from getting theirs. Grace creeps around the house squirreling away bottles of liquor as if she were in training to become an alcoholic. Yet she considers herself a model of good-tempered saintliness. ‘I’d like for us to be friends,’ she wheedles at Carla. ‘Why?’ says Thor, ‘are yours all dead?’
That is pure Norris. A tasteless, scabrous, off-the-cuff remark. It gets a huge laugh, too. The plot develops when a mysterious soldier, Purdy, shows up claiming to be a pal of Carla’s husband. He’s an amputee with a fibreglass hand that peeps out from the cuff of his parade uniform. Thor, as yet untutored in adult hypocrisy, gloats over the fake trotter in fascination and wonder. ‘Why didn’t you get one of those claws? You could pick stuff up.’ It’s intriguing to see how the missing hand leads Norris into blunders. He can’t resist congratulating himself on the amputation idea by making Purdy’s first name ‘Nelson’.
And he tries to get extra laughs with a scene of multiple comic mishaps. These are simple to write but devilishly hard to stage. A ladder spills, the false hand goes flying across the room and Carla, shocked into hysterical laughter, vomits into a bucket. Sadly, this mix-up falls flat. As does the entire Purdy character. His entrances are poorly motivated and his presence signals ‘mysterious otherness’ and ‘predatory eroticism’ far too blatantly. He’s a plaything of the drama rather than of real life. And when we learn about his prior involvement with Carla, the details are too icky to be believable.
Carla, by contrast, is a highly finished study in frustrated self-loathing and alcoholic dereliction. In Christopher Haydon’s taut, pacey production, Amelia Lowdell expertly captures Carla’s rapid transitions from morose self-pity to scathing abuse. When she finally gives Grace a full blast of her viciousness — ‘Thank God you never felt any love, you’d burst into flames, you dried-up sack of twigs!’ — we heave a sigh of relief and pleasure. The outstanding performance comes from Oliver Coopersmith as the charming and pugnacious Thor. But Coopersmith isn’t exactly 12 years old. He’s more like 21. That, too, is an error. Small kids are fine on stage. So are adolescents. But a pre-teen is always problematic. Norris learned a lot from this play. Other dramatists can too.
Similar problems faced the adaptors of the bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The protagonist is a damaged but gifted 15-year-old who learns that adults have a deeply uneasy relationship with the truth. The solution, in Marianne Elliott’s slick production, is to cast Luke Treadaway, 28, and leave it at that. Good call. Treadaway gives a nervily captivating performance as the awkward whizz-kid. And the show is well served by Bunny Christie’s imaginative and occasionally stunning designs. But the atmosphere is marred by self-consciousness and a surfeit of sentimentality. Not that the box-office is suffering as a result. Observers have noted a close resemblance between this and another runaway hit dripping with facile emotion. ‘We may have another War Horse on our hands,’ said Mark Haddon, the novel’s author. He’s probably right. Next stop, Broadway. Then Dreamworks.
Also in Arts Reviews
Also by Lloyd Evans
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in