Lloyd Evans
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Sunset Boulevard
Comedy
Marina Carr is a writer of enormous distinction which isn’t quite the same as being a writer of enormous talent. She’s been given chairs by so many universities that she could probably open a furniture shop. However, a certain snippet of advice — don’t invite comparisons with Shakespeare — seems to have escaped both her, and the RSC, who have commissioned a play from her which explicitly sets out to re-configure the Lear–Cordelia relationship. A different writer might have disguised her artistic ambitions with more guile but, no, here comes Professor Carr to conquer Everest in her flip-flops and T-shirt. The play opens with a peaky young woman paying a visit to a truculent snowy-bearded old fool who lives in a filthy hovel where he sleeps on a grand piano. Both are composers. The whingeing dad has been struggling through a quiet patch while his daughter (a far lesser talent, by his estimate) has been pumping out popular twiddles for classical radio channels. Irked by her success he preposterously demands that she cease writing altogether so that he can compose the great works that are still within him. Absurd though this may sound, the play has a weird moody splendour which is dramatically convincing and which raises interesting questions about the artist’s urge to slaughter all relationships on the Muse’s high sacrificial altar. There’s the occasional joke too. ‘I don’t drink, not since my false teeth fell into the toilet.’
In the second half, following Lear, the old man goes insane and at this point Carr loses her footing completely. The jokes vanish. She can’t handle the register of lunacy with any confidence or judgment and she resorts to a series of soaring lyrical spasms while the old man’s character fragments into pretentious, repetitive smithereens. As if echoing the painful and blundering script, Selina Cartmell’s direction starts sleepwalking through quicksand, too. At one point the performers swap costumes and a little later they swap back again. These elaborate doffings and donnings, atmospherically accompanied by much symphonic seething, triggered one of those Einsteinian experiences (all too frequent in the theatre), where the dimensions start to bend and groan and a mere five minutes of stage-time swallows up several months of your life. David Hargreaves, as the mad old dad, huffs and whinnies effectively enough and poor Michelle Gomez, one of the world’s funniest stage performers, wades through the entire script without raising a decent chuckle. Although the run ends on 10 January, I scent glad tidings in the air. With its small cast, cheap scruffy set and a script creaking with histrionic symbolism this show is assured a busy future on the international festival circuit. Avoid it.
During the boom, the West End had roughly the right number of houses to meet demand. With the crunch there are now three or four too many. One of these is the Comedy Theatre which has optimistically welcomed a low-rent Sunset Boulevard production that originated at the Watermill in Newbury. Fully credit-crunch-compliant, the show has no star and no orchestra. A troupe of multi-talented actor–musicians play all the instruments on stage. Written in 1993, the show comes from Lloyd Webber’s sock drawer rather than his top drawer. The rebellious exuberance of the early work had by then given way to stolid, professional calculation. The hummable tunes are spread pretty thinly and the lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton can’t match the zany wit of Tim Rice. Kathryn Evans, as the washed-up idol Norma Desmond, is never short of verve and volume and at moments her raw intensity is genuinely thrilling. But pathos is an emotion she has erased from her address book and some of her athletic grimaces might profitably be swapped for a bit of simple human tenderness. Ben Goddard’s Joe is pleasant, handsome and far too young. The greater the age gap the more squirmifying their love affair feels. The show-stealer here is David Willets as the perverse Germanic husband/butler who ditched his directorial career to become permanent keeper of the Desmond flame. This crazy narrative twist fits into the paranormal world of musicals far more neatly than it did into the film where it always seemed a bit unbelievable. This is a decent show, competently executed and it deserves its West End invite. And yet…that gloomy lighting, that tatty set. I somehow couldn’t quite erase the mischievous sense that I was watching an unusually good sixth-form production. And is this Gothic sob-story quite the escapist frivolity we need to carry us singing through the slump? I wonder.
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