Fallen Angels, Bringers of Joy

THE scene is a cold, soggy night in Shaftesbury Avenue. Despite the lateness of the hour, the street is full of cars moving at a snail's pace, their drivers' faces set and glum. But the crowd of mostly middle-aged people spreading on to the pavement appear absurdly happy; you can see them beaming at total strangers.

They have just emerged from the Apollo Theatre, where they have seen Michael Rud-man's production of No'l Coward's play Fallen Angels.

I know how they felt because last Tuesday I was one of them. The critics used words like "sparkling", "hilarious", "sheer, frothy delight", and all that is true, but what none of them added is that this is as near a perfect evening in the theatre as it is possible to achieve. The play is witty and light as a feather, though it never insults our intelligence.

Fallen Angels demands absolute precision to sustain the balance between farce and realism, and this it obtains from a cast which could hardly be bettered.

The second act, in which the two bored, rich wives, played by Felicity Kendal and Frances de la Tour, get completely sloshed as they await the imminent arrival of the gorgeous Frenchman they both had a fling with before they were married, is a tour de force of comic timing by two of our finest actresses. Tilly Tremayne's omniscient and multi-talented maid (surely a homage to Jeeves) rightly gets to bring the curtain down. Rud-man's direction is flawless in every detail, and Coward would surely have been pleased to endorse the comic business with which he embroiders the action.

The kind of delight I felt - a delight shared by the whole audience, as far as I could tell - is so rare that you want to bottle it and analyse its contents. The play, yes; the direction, yes; the actors, yes, above all for the rapport between Frances de la Tour and Felicity Kendal - but it was more than that, there had to be some other ingredient in the bottle.

AND so there was, I realised. It was the delightful novelty of being able to feel joyfully satisfied when you come out of a play in the West End.

It seems to me that we are very short on joyousness these days. We live without seeing the sun for three-quarters of the year, in a city where most of us struggle painfully into work, and then compete with our colleagues just to keep our heads above water, before struggling home to sit gloomily in front of the television. We deserve a bit of joy when we go out in the evening, something to uplift our spirits and take us out of ourselves - and it doesn't happen nearly as

often as it should. It's true that music is a great joy-bringer. Music-lovers carry high expectations to concerts and opera, and often those expectations are fulfilled. But theatre-goers in London, with more theatres to choose from than anywhere else on earth, increasingly find that the experience leaves them thinking - so what?

Theatre producers are well aware that the feel-good factor makes a difference to the box office. But whereas producers used to think like impresarios, confident that audiences would respond to good actors in a good play, many of them now behave like Hollywood accountants, thinking that a play's success depends on box-office celebrities bringing in pre-publicity.

I exclude musicals from this broadside. They cost too much not to be professionally mounted, and those which survive any length of time in the West End tend to be very good value for money. Nor is this an argument against revivals. Fallen Angels is a revival; so is Priestley's mar-vellous An Inspector Calls. I cannot speak for the revival of The Caretaker or Robin Phillips's forthcoming production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night.

My complaint is with the sheer mediocrity of most London theatre. The current West End playlist, with these few exceptions (to which might be added Simon Callow's one-man Dickens at the Albery), is variously worthy, flaccid, pretentious, unimaginative or just plain dumb.

Of course, nobody expects Hollywood star vehicles to send their audiences out into the night rejoicing (I exclude Kevin Spacey in The Iceman Cometh).

They are all exercises in voyeurism. The Blue Room, a coldly efficient little play, was at least open about it. The Graduate, despite Kathleen Turner's brave performance, was a clumsy, colourless piece of work; I hate to imagine what its revival is like. The Seven Year Itch is another wooden makeover of a wonderful film. The less said about Janet Suzman's production of The Guardsman, with Michael Pennington and Greta Scacchi, the better.

In fact, as far as I can see, very few of the recent revivals make for more than a dutiful evening out. Even those new powerhouses, the Almeida and the Donmar Warehouse, are low on electricity at the moment. For all his genius, Sam Mendes has not been

able to work miracles with Nick Whitby's laboured play about a First World War tank crew, To the Green Fields Beyond. The last play I saw at the Almeida, Yasmina Reza's Conversations After a Burial, was so small-mindedly pretentious that its cast appeared to have given up any attempt to engage with it.

D ON'T think I am holding some kind of torch for No'l Coward.

Next door to the Apollo, the stage adaptation of his Brief Encounter, with its movie shoe-in in the shape of Jenny Seagrove, was a classic example of how to get it wrong - although it was surely a low-voltage concept in the first place. And I appreciate that in every West End production there is an element of hit or miss.

But it should be a simple enough formula. All it takes is a couple of first-rate leading actors, an experienced director and the ability to find a truly well-written play. The Royal Court has had some success, notably with Sebastian Barry's glorious The Steward of Christendom. After flunking out with Brief Encounter, the producer Bill Kenwright got the formula right with Fallen Angels, and he has a hit on his hands. More than that, every night he is sending a theatre- full of tired, scratchy, preoccupied Londoners (and others) out into Shaftesbury Avenue with joy in their hearts, and that is something to be proud of.

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