WHAT a joy to welcome Ian Richardson, his velvet voice and silken skills intact, back to the stage after far too long an absence. The only problem is the play he has chosen or has been chosen for him.
Here’s an actor who could and should give us a Lear or Prospero — and he’s appearing in the revival of what’s not quite a comedy of manners, not quite a thriller, not quite anything.
Pauline Macaulay’s Creeper, which hit London in 1965, occupies a no man’s land between Enid Bagnold’s Chalk Garden, which brought a convicted murderess into an old lady’s home, and Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall, in which a pageboy roams another elderly woman’s house, this time with a severed head in a hatbox. It shares the odd entertaining line and a botanic (and symbolic) title with the first and a couple of moments of Grand Guignol with the second. But is that enough? Not really.
Richardson is Edward Kimberly, who is very rich, inhabits the sort of drawing-room set that went out of fashion 30 years ago, and prides himself on his eccentricity. All this is evident from the stylishness with which he interviews Oliver Dimsdale’s Maurice as the replacement for his current companion, Alan Cox’s Michel. “Ever driven a car when drunk?” he airily asks the newcomer, a repressed nerd who has come from selling shirts in Austin Reed. “No.” “You’ll have to learn to do that.”
There’s more gay undertow here than one expects of a play written before the Lord Chamberlain went to the knackers, but it doesn’t go deep or far. Edward half-admits to being an “old queen”, and recalls a childhood homosexual encounter, but isn’t fibbing when he says he disdains sex with his collection of young men. Cox’s spoiled, pettish Michel flounces about as if auditioning for a gay role in Brideshead Revisited. But it’s Maurice who is seriously damaged — and he hankers forlornly for women.
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Perhaps it’s his failure here that motivates him. Perhaps, like the other two, he has suffered at the hands of rejecting, destructive or self-destructive parents. Perhaps that’s why he goes into waking comas in which he blows up red balloons and, when under pressure, does unpleasant things about which I can reveal nothing — except that Austin Reed’s tie department is implicated and that Macaulay’s psychological profiling, such as it is, is decidedly off-the-peg.
All might be well, or wellish, if Bill Bryden’s production had more tension and emotional intensity. But things move almost as slowly as Harry Towb, playing Edward’s decrepit butler — and giving, let me add, a performance that in its nodding, shuffling way is almost as watchable as Richardson’s Edward.
Here, though, is the reason for visiting the Playhouse. How many other actors could suggest that somewhere beneath the blend of suavity and wit, fastidiousness, arrogance and over-age childishness there’s need, regret and a sense of being a dead man walking? The play lacks depth. The performance doesn’t.
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