Man behaving badly

John Osborne is back in the land of the living. For the last 20 years or so of his life I rarely saw a revival of any of his work without thinking how lucky he had been with the original casting, and how many of his plays had been rescued by the sheer theatricality of actors like Laurence Olivier and Albert Finney and Nicol Williamson. Look Back in Anger seemed to fare especially badly; creaky, verbose, overlong, it had begun in the 1980s to look like a relic from post-Victorian drama rather than the 1950s.

Well, guess what? A new production for the National by Gregory Hersov suggests that the play will, after all, survive into the millennium, that it does still have something to say to us, and that Jimmy Porter will live, and not only in a glass case at a theatre museum labelled `first angry young man'.

Is it that we have changed, or that the wheel has come full cycle, or just that the current revival is vastly better than any other we have seen? All of that. Jimmy's rootless rage, his sense of impending doom, his regret for a past he never knew, all somehow seem very 1990s. Jimmy is a man behaving badly, and the ultimate irony has always been that it was never with him that Osborne identified; the only character in the entire script written with love and sympathy and respect has always been the confused old colonel whom Osborne ultimately himself became in real life.

By busting the play down to two acts, by facing the distinct possibility that Jimmy is as much in love with his room-mate Cliff as with either of the women who try in very different ways to tame him, and by turning a once dangerously sentimental ending into something as chilly as Strindberg, Hersov has shot thousands of volts through the text and made it as relevant, topical, angry and intriguing as it has never been since those first heady days at the Court.

At the head of a superb cast, Michael Sheen is a wondrously louche, selfobsessed Jimmy, while Emma Fielding and Matilda Ziegler are well contrasted as the women in his life; what they have all understood is that this is a play about love and loss, about death and spiritual disintegration.

Osborne would not have welcomed the suggestion or the comparison, but Look Back in Anger is now looking very nearly as good as Rattigan's Deep Blue Sea and has much of the same emotional charge as it examines a group of people not waving but drowning in an immediately postwar ocean of uncertainties.

At the Bridewell, and long-awaited by at least those of us who have been playing the CD this last year or two, Adam Guettel's Floyd Collins is based on the true story of the likely lad who got himself trapped by his foot in a Kentucky cave back in 1925 and became one of the first of the new century's media celebrities, at least until he was careless enough to die underground, malnourished and barking mad.

If that story sounds oddly familiar, Billy Wilder made it back in 1951 as Ace in the Hole with Kirk Douglas as the cynic reporter who sees the carnival potential in the story. Half a century on, Guettel brings to his score an amazing mix of the lush romanticism of his grandfather Richard Rodgers and the cynical edginess of his guide Stephen Sondheim.

Floyd Collins now shares a good deal of its backwoods prewar background with Lloyd Webber's current Whistle Down the Wind; both shows look as though someone has had the bizarre notion of setting songs to Deliverance. Yet it has to be said the Lloyd Webber works better; by turning the cynical reporter into a sentimental saviour, Guettel has given his show at least three heroes but no real villains, so there's a distinct lack of tension here.

This is a dark, brooding show, haunting, edgy, often deliberately atonal, obsessed by a dysfunctional community so isolated as to be totally inbred. It is still in a way the story of hillbillies invaded by pressmen, but its problem is that not a lot happens quite slowly. A man gets trapped in a cage and dies there, despite a few heroic rescue attempts; all the same, Clive Paget's production and newcomers Nigel Richards and Jeremy David are all very impressive. The Bridewell, like the equally tiny and unsubsidised Jermyn Street, looks to be our best hope for new musical stagings into the new century.

What's in a name? Not a lot, apparently; only in the smallest of programme print will you discover that Jean Anouilh's Eurydice, in a new production now at the Whitehall, was once known in this country as Point of Departure, and nowhere will you learn that it was the play which back in 1950 made a film star of the late Dirk Bogarde and caused him to leave the theatre virtually forever.

Anouilh has been long and wrongly neglected by the British theatre; the National has yet to get around to him, and he has virtually dropped off all other revival lists. Eurydice may do something at long last to retrieve his reputation over here; written early in the Nazi occupation of Paris, not that you'd guess that either, this is a strange reworking of the old Orpheus legend in which a couple of doomed lovers, already half in love with death, finally get together beyond the grave.

As usual already on the fey side of pretentious, Anouilh needs charismatic players and here he gets a couple, though alas not in leading roles; Simon Godwin's production for the visiting Stray Dogs is low-budget and low key, but Desmond Barrit as the sinister master of ceremonies and Edward de Souza as the drunken father are both mesmerising. In the end, a slow script offers us a straight choice between an imperfect life and a perfect death; but play and production have a curious, stop-start, dreamlike quality which used to be the very essence of Gallic theatre and maybe it is time we had another look at it through the tunnel.

Copyright Spectator Jul 24, 1999
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