A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes, 7.11.15

“Are y’all ready?!  For a spirit-filled, water-baptized, saved and sanctified, Holy Ghost convocational, multi-denominational, occasionally Pentecostal, get on the good foot Gospel fest?”

 

“A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes”, the follow-up to last year’s moving “The House That Will Not Stand”, which has just received its world première at the Tricycle under director Indhu Rubasingham, looked like a change of direction for American playwright Marcus Gardley.  A full-throttle farce on the well-worn theme of the Southern preacher (African-American in this case) nicely broken-up by musical interludes, it opened with an invigorating Gospel choral anthem which took you straight back to the National’s re-staging of James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” in 2013.  (Both acting leads, Lucian Msmati and the full-throated Sharon D Clarke, previously appeared in that.) 

 

However, it shared more with Gardley’s earlier play than was first apparent.  Like the New Orleans piece, it was huge fun, melding camp gags, well-timed slapstick and a range of OTT accents with brio.  It was equally well-written, with the thirty-six-year-old Californian experimenting with verse and proving himself a wizard with words, one of the English-speaking theatrical world’s most promising newcomers.  Although a man was the focus of the plot, all the best lines, as with ‘House That Will Not Stand’, went to the women.  And as before, it adapted an earlier canonical work.  Whereas the earlier play drew loose inspiration from ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’, ‘Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes’ was more straightforwardly an update of ‘Tartuffe’, Molière’s 1664 satire on religious hypocrisy.  Most importantly, both plays shared the same theme of human cupidity and the corrosive effects of money-worshipping on relationships and values.

Sharon D Clarke's First Lady catches Lucian Msmati's Toof red-handed



In Gardley’s version, Tartuffe was ‘Apostle Toof’ (a rumbustiously lecherous Msmati, complete with “more rings on his fingers than the pope”) whose two-bit southern church, run as a business with his wife First Lady (the statuesque Sharon D Clarke), is about to be foreclosed by the bank.  Constitutionally incapable of keeping his snake in his trousers, but endowed with mysteriously healing hands, Toof (“the preacher who can reach ya and teach ya and beat ya with the book of truth”) has been caught by First Lady laying his hands on trailer-trash parishioner Maxine (a super dumb blonde cameo from Michelle Bonnard). 

In a providential deus ex machina, the formidable Mother Organdy (over-played to perfection by Angela Wynter), convinced that “this planet is going to hell in a fruit basket because women have rights” and fired up by Toof’s “demonic zeal (that) pulsates my pulse and causes all my pulpy places to perspire”, helicopters in from Hog Jaw, Tennessee to summon him to heal her son Organdy (Molière’s Orgon), a “fried-chicken-fat shack, check cashing, liquor store and funeral parlor tycoon” who’s dying of heart cancer.

Ayesha Antoine's Africa (Organdy's daughter), bamboozled by Toof

Toof somehow convinces the gullible Organdy he’s cured him and sets about relieving his relations (fey son Gumper, curvy mistress Peaches and recently-returned-daughter ‘Africa’) of their inheritance rights.

 

In a drastic twist to both Molière’s story and Gardley’s text, Rubasingham’s production let Toof succeed, but at the cost of losing everything he’s hitherto held dear.  The un-performable textual conclusion, involving a well-timed lightning-bolt, was ditched in favour of this more unsettling ending, quite at variance with the light-hearted tone of the rest of the piece.  I wasn’t sure the sudden switch to expressionist seriousness worked, but full marks to Rubasingham for playing with our expectations.

The troublesome ending aside, the one-liners zinged past at a rate of knots.  Meeting Ayesha Antoine’s ‘Africa’ (“it means she who laughs like the hyena, bathes like the hippo, hunts like the lioness and walks like the dodo bird”), Michelle Bonner’s maid replies:  “O, that’s sweet, Nigeria, but I got you beat.  I’m Rosarita Dorita Carnita Tortilla Margarita Chiquita Garcia.  And I’m American even though I’m 40% tequila and 60% Mexican”.



Brother-and-sister act:  Karl Queensborough's Gumper and Ayesha Antoine's Africa

Africa’s down-low brother Gumper (newcomer Karl Queensborough) alternated between bitching (“Are those flip-flops?  Tell me you didn’t hop half way ‘round the world looking like you sell ass at a truck stop”) and qualified warmth (“Seeing you will be the icing on a diabetic cupcake”).

Motley’s old school colleague Adjoa Andoh, who must be knocking fifty, did an impressive job as the ex-poledancer with the heart of gold (“Folks call me Peaches cause I’m the sweetest thang you ever gone meet”) and almost made you believe such baroquely convoluted lines as:

Adjoa Andoh's Peaches soon realises Lucian Msmati's Toof is
"just another man who talks with the muscle 'tween his legs"



“I am a thick, golden brown, brick house goddess of voluptuous lusciousness  … when God made me She broke the mould, and put an earthquake in the sway of my hops, a hurricane in the curve of my stride and a tornado in the whip of my hair.”

Toof’s ceremonial de-gaying of Gumper, fresh from telling his father how Ricky Martin “bangs”, was another coup-de-theâtre: 

“Tonight you become a man.  I rebuke every demon, every spirit, every sprite, every fairy.  I loosen from your heart every flower, every fruit, every Nancy, Pansy, every Mary … I cast out ponytails, painted nails and stylish Italian underwear.  I speak against booty shorts, muscle tees, periwinkle, winks and Elton John CDs except The Lion King ...  I dispatch angels to feed you a carb, to catch you up on rugby, to uncross your legs, to make you sit through Saving Private Ryan and break things for no apparent reason.”

Molière was probably turning in his grave but one had the sense Gardley had fun writing it and we certainly had great fun watching it.  Motley spotted new Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in the audience the night he went, so this playwright is picking up fans in high places too.

The House That Will Not Stand, 26.11.14

Queen Bee of New Orleans:
Martina Laird's Beartrice massaged
by her slave Makeda (Tanya Moodie)

Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand”, a compulsively watchable new African-American play currently playing at Indhu Rubasingham’s Tricycle in its European première, was a greedy child’s pick-a-mix in the sweet-store of literary tropes.

You want three young sisters pining for male suitors à la Chekhov and Cinders desperate to reach the ball?  Check.  You want an indomitable materfamilias ruling her family with a rod of iron à la Bernarda Alba?  Check.  You want a supposedly unhinged female relative locked up in the attic à la Miss Havisham?  Check.  You want a subordinate out-smarting their stubborn employer à la Goldoni?  Check.  A narrative of female emancipation like Celie’s in ‘The Color Purple”?  Check.  A steamy, sultry New Orleans à la “Streetcar”?  Check.  Drums providing distant echoes of Mother Africa like O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones”?  Check.  A ghost scene and domestic hocus-pocus fresh out of Edgar Allan Poe?  Check.  A bitch-fest between two pugnacious matrons Capote would have killed to write?  Check.

Martina Laird's Beartrice takes her sister
Marie (Claire Perkins) in hand

Add-in some cutesy Gallicisms (it was the French Quarter after all), a smattering of mournful Latin chanting (Lorca again), some sparkling patois (novel Creole meanings for “tea” and “pie”), and an inexhaustible fund of hot-zinger one-liners.  Stir.  Serve hot, courtesy of a female cast on tip-top-form.  Await applause, standing ovations (spontaneous on the night Motley was there) and, with luck, a generous dollop of gongs to follow.

 

The Three Sisters of Faubourg Treme:
devout Maude Lynn (Danusia Samal),
flighty Agnes (Ayesha Antoine) &
dreamy Odette (Ronke Adelkoluejo)

I make light of Gardley’s achievements. His new play broke fresh ground, uncovering a forgotten corner of U.S. history.  The setting was New Orleans 1836, after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), but before the full enforcement of binary U.S. race laws.  French and Spanish custom and colonial law had recognised a mestizo caste and enabled a few black women to own property (including their own slaves) by virtue of being white men’s concubines (“placées”).  But under U.S. governance the racial thumbscrews were tightening.  So when wealthy placée Beartrice’s common-law white husband dies mysteriously, there’s no time to be lost to ensure she keeps a roof over her head and provides for her variously-hued daughters, wayward sister and slave.

Playwright Marcus Gardley (b1978)

If gathering racial storm-clouds make Gardley’s play sound rather heavy (and the ending, while agonisingly well-done by Martina Laird, was a tad histrionic), what really marked Gardley’s play out was its verbal inventiveness, comic verve and the deftly-judged interplay between the female characters. 

 

Fresh from her success in "Intimate Apparel" in the summer, Tanya Moodie’s level-headed and regal slave Makeda demonstrated movingly that legal niceties are nothing set against emotional strength. But the most unforgettable scenes for this writer were the verbal duels between Martina Laird’s steely Beartrice and her sworn enemy, the well-upholstered La Veuve, played with a glint by Michele Austin:

La Veuve (Michelle Austin, to L) faces off against
Beartrice (Martina Laird, to R), flanked by
Beartrice's three daughters

“Sweet Jesus, when I heard you was poorer than Joe’s turkey, I shed a whole tear, I did.  That's why I’m really here in fact.  I ran over to share it with you.  See.  It’s still in my eye.  I’m saving it for you so you can wash the floors with it before I move in.“  (La Veuve)

“The only movin' you doin' is movin' them two antsy legs and that wide mouth off my porch.  I’m keeping my house.  ....  It’s sad that you hate me so much .... It makes me want to shed a whole tear for you.  And I would if I thought it would wash away your hatefulness.  But hate is your true love.  And one day it will eat you:  flesh, bone and sinew, till all that is left is your fluttering tongue:  that overworked red cut of meat that for all its flapping ain’t never did nobody no earthly good” (Beartrice)

 

Anyone who wants to catch this awesome show had better hurry:  it finishes Saturday November 29th.

 

My Night With Reg, 28.8.14

Robert Hastie's well-performed twentieth anniversary Donmar production of Kevin Elyot's 1994 landmark gay comedy set in 1985, a 1950s parlour drama with added profanity, was played through without intervals.  The play had created a stir back in 1994 as the first "out" gay drama to hit the West End.  Is it picky to think it might have worked better if it had been a little more "in"?  Comic toasts ("Gross indecency!") exemplified a tendency to banality, while the play helped initiate the tendency of every subsequent 'gay play' to throw in some arbitrary full-frontal nudity to pull in the punters. 


Lewis Reeves' butt enlivened an otherwise
less than enthralling trip down memory lane

Elyot (who died in June, just before this production opened) dallied in the over-familiar territory of the English inability to communicate or engage emotionally.

Most of the characters, with the exception of the youngster, were stereotypes, exiled from youthful dreams of David Bowie by fear of imminent lonely middle-age, or worse.
 

Jonathon Broadbent's apron-clad Guy

Jonathon Broadbent was heavily-bespectacled and repressed Guy, the recipient of multiple well-intentioned cookbooks for one, ever the hostess and never the bride.  Floppy-haired Geoffrey Streatfeild was Daniel, Reg’s dandyish widow, forever running off to hop on planes to the other side of the world.  Old-Etonian Julian Ovenden (better-known from “Downton Abbey” and the son of HMQ’s former chaplain, no less) was public-school drifter John, one of Reg’s many bits-on-the-side, and the object of Guy’s excruciatingly undeclared affections. 
 
Relief from the tiresome Oxbridge-ness of these three came from Matt Bardock as Benny, a priapically blunt Cockney bus driver, and from Richard Cant's Bernie, a classic bore who banged-on about conservatories with an impressively nasal whine.  Twinkly-blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old blond Lewis Reeves was ingénu Brummie painter Eric, the least damaged and most appealing character (as well as the least clothed). 
 

Geoffrey Streatfield's flighty Daniel and
Julian Ovenden's vulnerable John

The central conceit was, of course, that the eponymously absent Reg had slept with them all (bar Eric) and had just been carried off by AIDS.  The unexpected plot twist was that it was the gentlest and least promiscuous character (given to donning Marigolds before any intimate encounter) who was unexpectedly next in line for the Grim Reaper.
 

Lewis Reeves as Eric, the one point of optimism
in a play misleadingly labelled a "comedy" 

Motley's feelings about the play were strangely unchanged from twenty years ago.  It was quite hard to stomach the depressing mixture of unfulfilled men, mundane text (characters constantly being offered refills) and low comedy ("Nuts anyone?", asked the gauchely 'Carry-On' host at his breathtakingly dull soirée), even without the looming threat from an unnamed killer virus.  It was also too well-manneredly English, summoning up little of the rage of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", another early AIDS drama.
 
Elyot’s rancid view of gay men was unsentimental and reductive in more or less equal measure (though not entirely unfair, judging by post-production chat-room comments on the size of Mr Reeves’ equipment).  Improved social and medical conditions have fortunately allowed most gay men to move on from those terrible mid-Thatcher years – and not before time.  

Handbagged, 7.5.14

Marion Bailey as "Q" and Stella Gonet as "T" in Moira Buffini's comic gem "Handbagged"

Moira Buffini’s sparkling comedy about the weekly meetings between Maggs and HMQ, which Motley missed at its Tricycle première, has won a well-deserved transfer to the West End, and comes highly recommended. 

L-R: Lucy Robinson (Liz), Marion Bailey (Q)
Stella Gonet (T), Fenella Foolgar (Maggs)

This well-written, larky and funny play comprised two Thatchers (Stella Gonet as the older “T” in dark blue and Fenella Foolgar as the younger “Maggs” resplendent in royal blue) and two Queens (Marion Bailey, all scowls and jowls as the older “Q”, Lucy Robinson more neutral as the younger “Liz”), bouncing off each other.  The doubling of roles provided a mechanism for voicing the other self’s inner thoughts as well as for looking back in judgment. 

Neet Mohan and Jeff Rawle played a huge range of (mainly) male roles

Two excellent comic actors (Jeff Rawle from 90s TV's “Drop the Dead Donkey” and newcomer Neet Mohan) covered off a host of other cameos in a bewildering range of accents, from Denis to Kinnock to Reagan to (my favourite) Mohan in full drag as Nancy Reagan, immaculately coiffured in red, bouncing along on a bone-shaker driven by HMQ in Windsor Great Park. 

Buffini’s use of self-referencing meta-theatricality (the Queen is desperate for an interval, whilst Maggs is happy to dispense with it) and use of the male bit-parts to offer light relief and to give voice to opposing voices proved highly effective.  The nuanced text moved deftly from slapstick to pathos and gave a well-rounded view of each leading lady.  Motley particularly enjoyed the jokes about Thatcher shivering in Balmoral and loathing every minute of Prince Philip's barbecues.

Stella Gonet as the 1990 T and Fenella Foolgar as the 1979 Maggs

The culmination of the plot-line was the ‘Sunday Times’’ story from 1986 (which Motley remembers as if it were yesterday) claiming that HMQ was “dismayed” by Thatcher’s divisiveness.  “Is Her Majesty a socialist?” asks a Maggs clearly going off the psychological rails after the failed Brighton bomb.  “I don’t think she’s an actual Trot, old love” replies Denis. 

It’s a familiar story (cf “Margaret”, “The Long Walk to Finchley”, “The Iron Lady”), in many ways the background music to Motley's whole life, but one which it’s hard to tire of when, like this, it’s done so well.  It's also an altogether more entertaining effort than last year’s “The Audience”, which covered off broadly similar ground with La Mirren as HMQ.  Hard to believe it’s only 25 years since Prunella Scales as the Queen in Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution” was accused of lèse-majesté for the first ever stage depiction of a ruling monarch. 

Translations, 1.5.14

Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the linguistic confrontation between English and Gaelic in Nineteenth Century Ulster was poignant and moving.  The setting was County Donegal in 1833 as the Ordnance Survey moved in to compile the first reliable maps of this remote corner of the Empire.  Two army officers of dramatically different temperaments (Lancey and Yolland) arrive to map a rural backwater but are unable to communicate with the Irish-speaking villagers.  

Beth Cooke as Maire and John Conroy as Jimmy Jack

The play memorably gave voice to a Gaelic-speaking generation soon to be decimated by the Potato Famine (“Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag?”).  Friel dramatized that hinge moment in Irish history when Gaelic (still the language of c50% of the Irish in 1830) was displaced by English (the language of c75% of the Irish by 1850).  Ironically, the Irish-speaking peasants could only be represented on stage by characters speaking English. 

Niall Buggy bouncing along as the
hedge school master Hugh

The central character of Hugh Mor O’Donnell was a gift to any actor (in this case to the impressively stentorian Niall Buggy), an “aul drunken schoolmaster” who communicated floridly in richly orotund Latinisms (“Silentium!”).  Through Hugh, Friel asserted an authority for Gaelic by claiming an affinity between it and the classics (“our own culture and the classical tongues made a happier conjugation / English ... couldn’t really express us”). 

Friel used the character of Hugh's oddball buddy Jimmy Jack (John Conroy) to underline that being non-Anglophone didn't mean being uneducated.  Self-taught Jimmy was so deeply ensconced in the classics that he addressed the Gods of the Greek myths, who were as real to him as his neighbours, in Greek.  There was more than a hint that languages may have functional specialisations:  English for commerce, but Gaelic, Latin or Greek for learning.

Not all the villagers were keen to keep up their Gaelic though and the chief facilitator of English linguistic colonialism was Hugh's shopkeeper son Owen (played by the chirpy bearded Cian Barry).  The strongest scene of the play was when Owen watered down the more egregious elements of the official proclamations from the ramrod Captain Lancey (Paul Cawley), systematically mistranslating his English to make it less offensive to the Irish. 

James Northcote as Ltnt Yolland

In contrast, the other, far more idealistic, Englishman, Lieutenant Yolland (a slimly winning James Northcote), primarily responsible for translating (or mistranslating?) all the Gaelic place-names into English for the new maps, was seduced by the countryside, the "poteen" and by local girl Maire (Beth Cooke).  This latter entanglement put him in competition with Hugh's younger son Manus (Ciaran O’Brien).  In this 'linguistic war' it was Yolland, the character who strove hardest to bridge cultural differences, that had to pay the highest price. 
‘Translations’ was far being from a Nationalist tract.  In many ways, the characters like Yolland, Maire and Owen who tried to find a middle ground between colonisers and colonised were the most attractive. The serious political points were also lightened through the inclusion of much classic Beckettian-style blarney, particularly from the vaudevillian pairing of Hugh and Jimmy. 




Brian Friel

The under-rated Friel has a strong claim to be considered our greatest living playwright (though Stoppard runs him close).  As "The Times" put it:  "Nobody can write as wrenchingly as Friel about the ache of the soul and its yearning for ecstasy". 

Friel's greatest skill is his ability to capture twilight moments, the melancholia of the marginal and the displaced, and to give them voice through language of limpid beauty and precision (see also "Faith Healer", "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "Molly Sweeney"). 

In "Translations", Friel's message, through Hugh, was that:  
“It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language”. 

Hugh boasted Friel’s best lines and most acute insights, such as: 
“Remember that words are signals, counters.  They are not immortal.  And it can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact”.  

Or again:  “You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. It (Gaelic) is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows.  It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only hope of replying to ... inevitabilities.”

Sheffield Crucible’s impressive touring production (directed by James Grieve on a suitably rustic set by Lucy Osborne) gathered strength from its faithfulness to Friel’s powerful text.  And Kingston's smartly suburban Rose Theatre made an ironic contrast to the tumbledown setting of the play.  This was a show guaranteed to make a ‘Hibernophile’ of anyone!

Inner Voices, 20.3.14

Brothers Peppe & Toni Servillo as the Saporito brothers
in di Filippo's satire 'Inner Voices' 

For the third time in two weeks Motley was successful queueing for returns for a sold-out show! 

Eduardo di Filippo’s black comedy (‘Le voci di dentro’) was a satire on the breakdown of trust between neighbours and within families in a morally ravaged post-war Italy (1948).  This was its first UK outing since Ralph Richardson and Joan Plowright played it back in 1982 (Richardson's last performance). 

The show was performed in Neapolitan by the Teatro Uniti di Napoli on a minimalist white set at the Barbican.  Although reliance on surtitles eliminated some of the immediacy, it was fascinating to hear how different Neapolitan sounds from standard Tuscan Italian.  One of only three London showings on a global tour, tickets were sold out as it starred and was directed by the great Tony Servillo, undisputed ‘uomo di punta’ (top dog) of contemporary Italian stage and screen (star of ‘The Great Beauty’ and ‘Il Divo’).
 

Belated repentance from an un-tailored Tony Servillo in 'Inner Voices'

Servillo played Alberto Saporito, a broken-down bachelor who shares an apartment (whose only belongings are a set of broken wooden school-chairs) with his brother Carlo (an engagingly hang-dog performance from Servillo’s own brother Peppe).  Also living with them is ‘Zio Nicola’, an uncle who’s stubbornly chosen to live in silence--communicating only via fireworks--“because the world is deaf”.  It was fascinating to see Servillo exchange his crisp in-control on-screen demeanour to play—or more accurately to under-play--a jowly Chaplinesque bumbling tramp.  Servillo conveyed mountains with simple hand gestures, at one point transmitting all the lowliness of post-war humanity just by holding his head in his hands. 


Alberto hoping for breakfast from the family he's just denounced

His character Alberto, possibly suffering from a guilty conscience, experiences a dream (a mirror image of the maid's earlier dream about a 'murderous maggot') telling him his neighbours, the Cimmarutas (a collection of seaside-postcard grotesques) have killed his friend Aniello.  The diminutive Don Pasquale Cimmaruta (Gigio Morra) is being cuckolded by his voracious corseted late middle-aged wife, while their two children bicker and their Aunt Rosa (Betti Pedrazzi) bullies the lethargic maid Maria.  After denouncing the family to la polizia municipale, Alberto hastens round to their breakfast table, both to cadge food and to witness their arrests in person (“Burn them alive!” he cries disconcertingly, as they’re led away.). 

What you'd call a 'lived-in' face!
Neapolitan playwright Eduardo di Filippo (1900-84)

In classic absurdist style, the dream then becomes father to the reality as, despite Alberto's belated repentance, each member of the family denounce each other in turn, thinking he has evidence of their guilt.  This is a world in which everyone is prepared to sell everyone else out for their own advantage.  It was far closer to the ‘theatre of the absurd’ than to Pirandello, with some of the same sense of menace as Rhinocéros (which Motley was privileged to see at the Barbican last year en francais).  The two dried-up brothers also had more than a hint of Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon about them.  It was altogether a more interesting offering than the Almeida’s blandly whimsical production of di Filippo’s ‘Filumena’ (Motley's only other experience of this playwright) and deservedly generated a rapturous audience response. 

Variation on a Theme, Finborough, 15.3.14

"As far as I could see the star of the show was Norman Hartnell, from whose contributions - a white diamante sack, a shocking pink cocktail dress in pleated chiffon, a casual ensemble of blouse and pedal-pushing slacks, and a two-tiered ball-gown in navy-blue pebble-crepe-the lean extremities of Margaret Leighton nervously protruded.  Miss Leighton, traipsing about looking wry and motherly, knocking back brandies and making rueful little moues of despair, modelled the clothes splendidly.  I didn't spot much real acting going on, but then there wasn't much reality to begin with."  (Ken Tynan savaging Gielgud's original production of Terry Rattigan's 'Variation on a Theme', back in 1958)



Rachael Stirling: just born
to wear an evening gown! 

Motley will declare his affiliations straightaway:  he's fond of Terry Rattigan's oeuvre.  So when it was announced that Earl’s Court’s tiny Finborough Theatre, very much terra incognita for the East London Motley, were staging this historical curio, only its second-ever production since the disastrous 1958 opening production, he had to see it, even though that meant queuing for 90 minutes for returns for a show who's whole run is sold out.

Happily, dear reader, he got in, and had the chance to see the work which famously inspired Shelagh Delaney to go home declaring ‘I can do better than that’, and thence onward and upward to write “A Taste of Honey”. 

No longer en route for 'The Magic Mountain': 
Stirling's Rose choosing love - and thus death from consumption
- over a retreat to a Swiss sanatorium

I could understand why this campy tale of fading Riviera actresses selling their bodies to shady "gutter tycoons" to keep themselves in mink (whilst wasting their lives on brandy and baccarat) might have got under the craw of the kitchen-sink brigade.  There was more than a hint of the Tennessee Williams's about it.

Inspired by Dumas’s ‘La Dame aux Camellias’, one couldn't help thinking 1958 was a little late for a ‘dying consumptive’ plot-line.  As Tynan famously put it:  "Master Terence makes no bones about his sources.  Trouble is, he makes no flesh either."  The play's mordant views on human motivation, and its mercantile take on the female of the species (Rose has married serially for money) were, on the surface, scarcely calculated to endear it to the young or the idealistic. 

Rachael Stirling converting Martin McCreadle's Ron
to the joys of bisexuality

However, Michael Oakley’s production at the Finborough delivered superb performances all round.  Rachael Stirling was vampy-and-vulnerable as the consumptive Rose (coming close to reprising her role as Yelena in the magnificent 2007 Wilton's production of ‘Vanya’).  Rose, poor thing, has gone through three husbands' money and is down to her last few thousand, kept from penury only by the capable ministrations of her "ladies’ companion” Hettie, a Duke’s daughter no less.  Torn between shady billionaire Kurt (Phil Cheadle, saddled by Rattigan with risibly cod-Teutonic malapropisms) and poor-but-hunky ballet dancer Ron (newcomer Martin McCreadle), she initially chooses "the lolly man", before finally and not before time recognising that love (or more accurately, perhaps, lust) trumps cash every time. 

Martin McCreadle, channelling Brando,
faces his foe Hettie (Susan Tracey)

The supporting cast were quite on a par with Ms Stirling, particularly Susan Tracey as the magnificently clipped and sensible  'paid help' Hettie, Rose's emotional rock.  Martin McCreadle's well-upholstered Ron pirouetted around the stage, half Nijinsky and half Brando, to the point where one could almost overlook his character's bizarre alternation between Russian and Brummie accents.  Emma Amos corpsed her way through some fun cameo turns as vapid pouting American heiress Mona, the doyenne of the canasta table.  A dash of bisexual spice was added in Act Two when Ron’s world-weary gay patron Sam (David Shelley) got to "have-it-out" with the woman who'd effectively stolen his protégé:

"You don't seem to understand that the Rons of this world always end by hating the people they need.  They can't help it.  It's compulsive.  Of course if probably isn't plain hate.  It's love-hate, or hate-love, or some other Freudian jargon - but it's still a pretty good imitation of the real thing.  You see - when day after day, and night after night - you're being kicked hard and steadily in the teeth, it's not all that important what the character who's doing it feels for you.  You can leave that to the psychiatrists to work out.  All you can do is nurse a broken jaw and, in your own good time, get the hell out.  I'll give you six months - from the honeymoon.  Take a bet?"  (Jilted Sam, possibly giving voice to Rattigan's own feelings about gold-diggers, in his Act Two confrontation with Rose.) 

We were back again in Rattigan-land, where the primary dangers are self-deception and emotional repression, and where, in the counsel that Rose ascribes to Hettie, "you can expel Nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes back".  The lead character had spent so long "fighting Nature to get where she was" (very comfortably ensconced on the Riviera) that she'd almost forgotten how to love.  It took a 'naked' declaration of "need" from the more-vulnerable-than-he-appeared Ron to awaken her own need to love.

The problem for Rattigan was that this message, which came out much more clearly upon reading the well-constructed text, got slightly lost in the high camp fun of the show.  This reflected a degree of trying to have-his-cake-and-eat-it.  Rattigan was simultaneously preaching the virtues of being true to yourself and slating the vacuousness of the lives of the Cannes set (the 0.001%) whilst revelling in their Lagondas, Christian Dior one-pieces and champagne martinis.  Hopefully an excellent production fifty-six years late will do something to restore the reputation of an overlooked work.