LONDON TRIP REVIEWS

April 01

If Boston Marriage is David Mamet's way of showing he can write women, he's mistaken. I saw the closing performance at the Donmar Warehouse, with a cast of Zoe Wanamaker, Anna Chancellor, and Lyndsey Marshal; and even on closing night, when normally a production is at its best, this struck me as a self-indulgent piece of fluff. Why it's transferred to the West End I can't imagine, except for the playwright's fame. The play comprises 3 scenes, one and a half hours without interval, of fustian language punctuated by terse epithets, some contemporary and some anachronistic. The plot: Anna welcomes Clare home, proud of having become the mistress of a male protector who will support her and Clare, her true lover; Clare bursts the bubble by announcing she's in love with a younger woman, and recruits Anna's help for an assignation; the new beloved turns out to be the daughter of the male protector. Predictable complications ensue, some quite funny but all utterly pointless. The dialog being half pseudo-Henry-James and half Mamet, the actresses had tough sledding: "Clare" fell back on a deadpan delivery, "Anna"--whose lines were more rococo--stumbled frequently. In short: a play worth missing.

This production of Harold Pinter'sThe Homecoming leaned more toward humor and less toward menace than any production I've seen. My impression was that the marvelous Ian Holm--who defined the angry-young-man role of Lenny a couple decades ago and here plays the angry-old-curmudgeon role of Max--has realized over the years that this play really is a huge joke. He kept breaking out in a great grin, often shared by the audience. And why not?--when Lia Williams's Ruth, the only female in the piece, is not a woman but a Barbie doll? Painfully thin, improbably buxom, with artificial blonde curls and overdone make-up, she restricts her voice to a husky murmur. She certainly found her niche in this dollhouse of a set, with nary a coffee stain or cigarette burn anywhere despite being inhabited by a group of men who (mostly) despise self-restraint, housework and each other. The rest of the cast gave performances far more restrained than I've seen in other productions, with the result that I lost the sense of menace that normally permeates this play and indeed nearly fell asleep a few times. I wished for either more malevolence, or that Holm's push in the other direction, toward the comic, had been taken up more consciously by the director (Robin LeFevre) and the rest of the cast. All in all, this "Homecoming" struck me as nothing so much as a mean-spirited adult version of "Peter Pan."

Regarding The Royal Family, I agree entirely with Darren Dalgleish's review: a spectacular cast makes this unremarkable play worth seeing, for three reasons: some extraordinary performances (in particular, the brilliant Judi Dench and Toby Stephens); fabulous Art-Nouveau costumes; and a worthy cause. I heard through the theatre grapevine that Sir Peter Hall and his band of allies mounted this production (and the next one, "Lady Windemere's Fan," with Vanessa Redgrave and Joely Richardson) to save the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, by establishing it as a producing theater, rather than let it either fold or be annexed as one in a stable of corporate-owned venues. May they prosper!

(/ Carol Verburg / verb@networksplus.net)