Lloyd Evans
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The script feels like the hopeful debut of a talentless bungler rather than the product of experience. Poliakoff really has no dramatic skills at all. He’s ill at ease with conflict. Subtext is a stranger to his dialogue. His scenes drift without shape or moment. He’s unable to enlist our loyalties and force us to commit ourselves emotionally to one character or another. Even the most basic things are botched.
He can’t give people credible motives or find simple reasons for them to meet. His cast of garrulous oddballs are constantly booking insanely complicated appointments in strange bistros. ‘Why?’ you keep asking, ‘why are they going there to see those people?’ A competent playwright would make them neighbours or just give them a family connection. By doing neither he tangles himself in dreadful knots. Having fluffed the location issue he has to waste pages of drippy dialogue gathering up loose ends and getting everyone from one set-piece to another. Soliloquys are the only substantial thing here. Stand-alone urban myths or taxi-driverish laments. Oh, goodness, how we’re surrounded with security cameras nowadays. And, oh Lord, what’s become of dear old London.
But there’s a deeper difficulty with Poliakoff. If you’ve ever sat through one of his dramas and felt yourself slithering into a coma, the reason is this. His conception of mankind is impossibly rosy. All his characters are decent, articulate, sympathetic, intelligent and good-natured. This makes them stranglingly dull. I felt not the tiniest scrap of concern for these twaddlesome well-meaning nits. And the absence of a plot scarcely helped. Two rows ahead of me a well-dressed couple spent the last half-hour of the play dozing silently on each other’s shoulders. Like medieval tomb statues, half-upright. Rather touching. And the only emotive thing on view. But it’s never too late to master the dramatist’s craft, and I look forward to significant improvements in Poliakoff’s next effort. Hopefully, these pointers will prove useful.
Steve Thompson, a brilliant chameleon writer, likes to immerse himself in abstruse professions and produce gripping accounts from the field of play. Recently he has written, with great panache, about City traders and the Tory whips office. Now he turns to a 1975 legal battle in America. The mighty ABC network was challenged in court by Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam over cuts to the Monty Python show. Sounds like a surefire hit.
The opening scene, with Palin rehearsing streams of one-liners, sets the bar high. ‘Two television aerials get married. Lousy wedding. Wonderful reception.’ The rest of the show can’t quite match the distilled elixir of the Python scripts. Off-duty, Palin and Gilliam fail to produce the sort of fizzing zany banter one expects, and the funniest dialogue comes from Matthew Marsh as a sardonic, self-mocking judge. Harry Hadden-Paton is great as the ruffled charmer, Palin. And Sam Alexander captures Gilliam’s satirical rage with almost too much zest. Very nice period costumes, too. A pity the theatre could only scrape together a budget of 50p for Francis O’Connor’s wobbly chipboard sets.
But let’s not condemn this as a well-intentioned flop because something extraordinary happened during the performance. The house, which was far from full, erupted several times into spontaneous applause. A great rarity that. And clear proof of sky-high approval ratings. With Monty Python one can never be sure. It rose from the graveyard slot on BBC1 to dominate the world of comedy. It’s the ultimate sleeper hit. This play, too, could become a cult.
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