Elling is a prim, prissy Norwegian who went mentally to pieces when his mother’s death ended their weird, Oedipal bond (“she did the shopping and I did the ideology”). He is now on conditional release from the asylum where he’s spent the past two years. If he and his equally damaged friend, the sex-obsessed Kjell Bjarne, prove able to cope, they may remain in a subsidised Oslo flat, taking part in a Scandinavian Odd Couple rather than returning to a nordic Nurse Ratched in a subIbsenesque version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Whatever one thinks of the comedy that Simon Bent has adapted from the cult film that had its origins in a novel by Ingvar Ambj?rnsen – and it’s often enjoyable but rather slighter than I’d been led to expect from the raves it received at the Bush – it provides John Simm of Life on Mars and Adrian Bower of Teachers the chance to show that they’re not just television stars on the theatrical make. Both are terrific, especially Simm, who half-pads, half-scuttles from the cupboard in which he’s sleeping, looking like a blend of white mouse and the late Kenneth Williams and, in his punctilious, high-pitched way, sounding a bit like that unlikely coupling too.
But where’s the plot, the surprises and the laughter I’d hoped for? All, I think, could be in more generous supply. Simm’s paranoid Elling begins his new life warily, but manages to make friends with an eccentric old poet, himself beautifully played by Jonathan Cecil. Still less credibly, the pregnant lady upstairs takes a shine to that 40-year-old virgin, Bower’s big, bashful Bjarne, despite his shaggy, gorilla looks and habit of not changing his underpants for aeons.
The idea, if you can so dignify it, is that seeming no-hopers can gradually become self-reliant. They can turn childish interdependence into a mature bond. They can convince Keir Charles as the laid-back but sceptical representative of Norway’s welfare state that they’re “normal”, whatever that means.
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It’s a play that does a fair amount of treading water and has its loose ends as well as its implausibilities. When Ingrid Lacey’s Reidun finally gives birth to a 10lb baby girl, Bent seems to forget that there’s been a previous mention of hydrocephalus. Will the adoring Bjarne be helping to look after a child with more problems than himself? You don’t quite feel that the upbeat ending, unfashionable and welcome as it is, has altogether been earned.
Yet when Bjarne is goofing about in his woolly hat, exuding lascivious innocence and dotty good nature, or Elling is earnestly reinventing himself as the Sauerkraut Poet, meaning he crams his verses into sauerkraut packets and shoves them on supermarket shelves, Paul Miller’s production undeniably has a whimsical charm. And Life After Ma, as the play might have been called, proves that John Simm is a finer actor than Life On Mars ever allowed him to show.