Best thing since...

Theatre Toast

(Royal Court Upstairs)

Lift Off

(Royal Court Upstairs)

Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly

(Arts)

A critic's place is generally in the wrong; in this column last week I was suggesting that precious few really good new plays emerge from seasons dedicated to new writing, and here we have at least one exception to prove the rule. At the Royal Court Upstairs, formerly the Ambassadors but now a theatre so gutted by the Court's bulldozers that they might as well just tear the whole place down and put up a tent instead, there is a new play called Toast by Richard Bean which is as funny, touching and brilliant an account of men at work as any we have had since David Storey's The Changing Room, also at the Court, some 30 years ago.

This time we are in a Yorkshire bakery in 1975; among the bakers are the usual archetypes (the veteran, the union man, the sinister newcomer, the joker) but Bean, much helped by his director the veteran comic actor Richard Wilson, brings them all to new and wondrous life. True, we never see them actually baking the bread; but the rumble of the offstage ovens, and in particular the terrifying moment when that rumble goes suddenly silent, gives a background against which the author can make all his points about a slowly vanishing but fascinatingly inbred (forgive the unintentional pun) community whose lives are measured out not in teaspoons but in slices of white bread for toasting.

The metaphors here are almost too apparent: lives crumble like loaves, and characters are toasted in the heat of their own personal or familial agonies. But some truly wondrous characters have been created, not least Sam Kelly playing the jovial Cecil almost exactly halfway from Arthur Askey to Eric Morecambe among vaudeville comics of this period, and Christopher Campbell's truly creepy newcomer, an apparent student with the fixation that he has been sent by God to help the bakers meet their ultimate maker. There is no reason why Toast, in its superbly antiquated setting by Julian McGowan, should not set itself free of the current Court season and survive for months if not years in the West End as one of the most truly original comedies of the late Nineties.

In this same season at the Ambassadors, Roy Williams's Lift Off is a hugely topical account of racial intolerance and unrest, centred on two schoolboys (Sid Mitchell and Ashley Chin), one black and one white, whom we then meet in later life (Michael Price and Alex Walkinshaw) when their conditioning from childhood has already damaged their chances of later peaceful coexistence.

On a brilliant set by Ultz, which is effectively a raised boxing ring around which the audience sits on all four sides, the play is staged by Indhu Rubasingham like a prizefight, but it never really achieves a knockout punch or even a victory on points, largely because Williams, having highlighted the fact that racial intolerance starts in the schoolyard, seems oddly uncertain as to what else he wishes to tell us about it. There's a lot of energy here, in the acting and the writing, but Lift Off somehow never quite does.

And at the Arts a real curiosity. Howard Crabtree's When Pigs Fly has been an immensely long-running off-Broadway hit despite the fact that Mr Crabtree himself sadly died five days before the original show opened in 1996; it would be unforgivably tasteless (much like the show) to suggest that this was a wise career move, but his posthumous hit remains one of those American eccentricities doomed to sink somewhere in mid-Atlantic.

At a time when we are once again being told, by a special supplement to the New York Times no less, that the Broadway and West End theatre have never been closer in terms of crossover, certain barriers still remain. Why else would The Mousetrap have never opened on Broadway in 50 years, or would there have been three failed attempts to import that longest-running of all New York hits, The Fantasticks? Next month the Jermyn Street Theatre is having another London attempt at Forbidden Broadway; this will be the third, and I can only wish it better luck and longer life than the other two.

The central problem with When Pigs Fly is that it is now dated and deeply unfunny, and that an English cast have considerable trouble getting themselves into some costumes of epic proportions and a show which, meant perhaps as a valiant shriek on the battlefield of Aids, now just looks embarrassingly amateur and juvenile. Seen after midnight at about 40 minutes across the bar of a gay club in the outer suburbs, When Pigs Fly might just about survive as a quirky satirical revue, albeit the songs are nearly as bad as the sketches; but, in the chill of the Arts Theatre at West End prices, even the few faithful who had gathered to huddle together in the warmth of the footlights on the night I was there looked as though they would not be coming back; some of them didn't even make it after the interval.

In New York When Pigs Fly seemed to be standing up bravely in the face of the horror and uncertainty of watching young men die of Aids and wondering where the plague would fall next. It celebrated them with that curious sub-section of theatricality known as 'camp', high or otherwise. Not only is it out of its element here in London where our version of camp is quite different, it is out of its time now that Aids has faded both in fact and in consciousness. Importers beware; we are still in some theatrical senses two nations divided by a common language.

Copyright Spectator Mar 6, 1999
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