Lloyd Evans
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Much of the comic business is taken at its true value: if it’s rubbish, it gets chucked out. The cross-garters are done sensibly (yellow understockings, black garters, not the other way round). Simon Paisley Day, as Malvolio, is a cauldron of stifled malice and he aims downward into the role’s depth rather than upward for laughs. He handles the smiling business judiciously. One half-smile then he drops it altogether. Of all the productions I’ve seen, this represents a sort of peak in that the comedy is less unfunny than usual.
If you have tickets make sure you invest in the programme, which contains a superb analysis of the play written by Hall when he was 30. He argues paradoxically that the most important character is the fool, Feste, ‘bitter, insecure, and poised uneasily between the two worlds of the court and the great house’. He suggests that each of the principals, bar Viola, is motivated by romantic excess. Orsino is in love with love, Olivia with grief, Sir Toby with merriment, Sir Andrew with pretention and Malvolio with egoism. I read this fascinating primer five minutes before taking my seat and I was seized with a sudden and intoxicating eagerness to embrace the play and adore it. And then the lights went up. And the plot began. And then, well, you know.
At the Hampstead Theatre, run by Sir Peter’s son Ed, there’s a new drama by the prolific Nina Raine. We’re in a busy modern hospital staffed by a bunch of yuppie doctors in various stages of emotional meltdown. One has a growth on his neck. Another is terrified of killing her patients. A randy young doctor doesn’t like working alongside his recently transferred girlfriend.
Raine maintains a steady supply of one-liners to keep us interested. ‘For women, having children is what you do when your career hasn’t worked.’ Clearly, months of research were lavished on this finely tuned script. But research can be a problem. It establishes a debt — to the research itself — which the writer wants to honour at the cost of neglecting the theatre’s entertain-me imperative.
Raine manages to channel most of her information into convincing dramatic helpings but occasionally something pops out half-baked. A surgeon’s insurance, we learn, is void once he strays outside the hospital’s strict procedural guidelines. And those cheap flappy gowns they wear aren’t so cheap. Ten quid to buy, 20 to sterilise. As a gripping soap opera that exposes the troubled heart of the NHS this show works superbly. Ideal for teenagers considering a medical career.
Great performances, too. Thusitha Jayasundera plays an Asian surgeon with a terrific blend of cynicism and truculence, and Nicholas Tennant is on form as a cuddly careworn senior. But the show doesn’t convince as theatre. There’s no central figure or dominant storyline. The relationships evolve rather loosely and the range of characters neatly covers every age group from teen to gran and every ethnic strand in the British Isles. It looks like a TV project fallen on hard times and offered soup and a warm blanket at Uncle Ed’s Hampstead hospice. Enjoyable stuff. Next time can we have a play?
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