HOW TO WASTE A STELLAR CAST
Sheridan Smith is not only a box-office draw but a rare and genuine talent: two decades a star on screen and stage, musicals and drama: phenomenally hardworking (she flew off to make a TV series in Greece, complete with toddler, the day after her last curtain call in her sellout solo Shirley Valentine). In 2016, her father’s terminal illness during the run of Funny Girl (as usual, selling out) drove her into what she calls a “meltdown”. She ran away briefly, got a number of tattoos, wanted to hide, thought she’d never get work again. People talk about that a lot, though tending to forget that actually, she was rapidly back onstage and, moreover, did the whole national tour. A trouper.
This is relevant, because her one bad “moment” is not unconnected to director Ivo Van Hove’s casting of her in this new musical by Rufus Wainwright, based quite loosely by the director himself on a film by John Cassavetes . For it is about a female star having a mental collapse on the eve of a big Broadway-bound opening, causing chaos, breaking the fourth wall, ad-libbing, drinking. As Smith blithely said to me in December, “It’s about an actress having a crisis. And that’s really facing, head-on, my past. You know? Hopefully that’s what I can bring to it.” As she does, every time, digging recklessly deep and bringing herself to a part 100%, whether as Hedda Gabler at the Old Vic or Mrs Biggs on telly.
I have to say, sadly, that Mr van Hove does not deserve his luck, either in his star or in the creepy frisson of people’s interest in her past. The play, a platinum-plated example of theatre vanishing admiringly up its own backside, is a bit of a mess. It claims in publicity to be an insight into the labour, agony, tension and sturm-und-drang of making a big musical: we are backstage and front, watching a dressing-room mirror, in the wings and occasionally back in the director’s digs. EVeryone is surrounded by creeping cameras, faces blasted up onto a huge overhead screen in case we miss some rictus of pain (this fashionable tech does, of course, also magnify the brow microphones: something screen-crazed directors cannot admit to themselves).
In story Myrtle, the star, sees a young girl fan killed on the road. The distress of this unhinges her, the ghostly kid appearing alongside her sometimes as support or a younger self, sometimes as a malevolent haunting. Sheridan Smith as ever throws herself into the pain (all the famous tattoos are on show for once, which must be a relief since she has talked amusingly of the bore of covering them). She manages to give the character an edge of ironic humour too, in soite of the lines. In one good song she says that in a theatre you “make magic outta tragic”, which is amost lovely . Anyway, Myrtle is hyper, and nervy. This is not surprising, given the intensity of her director (Hadley Fraser as Manny) who is neglecting his own wife (Amy Lennox) in his obsession with the show., and the attitude of Maurice, her leading man and former lover . He is supposed to hit her, and in a horrible sequence she flinches away at every rehearsed attempt, despite being gruffly told it’s “just fingers”. The director furiously shouts “It is necessary to my staging that you’re hit” . The misogyny, and the director’s contempt for her “need to be loved..she is like all women, she seeks immortality” starts to grate more and more.
Things are not helped by the fact that Myrtle, sensibly, doesn’t think much of the script, feeling many lines hopelessly unlikely to be spoken by any woman. The playwright is stroppy Sarah (a wicked waste of Nicola Hughes) who thinks she’s Ibsen reincarnated and must not be challenged, and is always in the wings looking miserable and irritated (great singer, though). Her obsession, like the men’s, seems to be to hammer home the idea that this is a menopausal woman who hates growing older, as women obviously do, being vain and vapid compared to heroic males. More gold-plated woman-on-woman misogyny there, and snarls from Sarah of “there must be some reason you cannot say my lines”. The producer (played by John Marquez) is a more kindly soul, but to emphasise how very, very difficult and important musical-theatre is, compared to normal life and work, he yowls “Underneath the pit of hell is a little heaven – why else do we do this, fly into darkness?”
Through all this Sheridan Smith is flawless, expressing every required frustration right up to the edge of a manically fighting-mad breakdown in leopardprint , involving a curious battle with her now malign ghost Nancy and a standard lamp . And then, as in the original film, there’s a sort of happy ending in which love pours out on both sides of the fourth wall and it doesn’t matter that the play has been changed by the diva. It is a terrific cast, of course. All of them sing wonderfully, though few of Wainwright’s numbers are memorable. All of them efficiently do as the director’s curiously sadistic vision requires. But it’s a pretty awful play. And it would be good if one day, someone firmly took away van Hove’s tech toybox and asked him to try just telling us a story. One that we’d believe and be moved by, ideally without benefit of onstage cameras and screens. He did it in 2014 with a brilliant, starkly set A View from the Bridge, after all.
gielgudtheatre.co.uk to 27 July
rating two.
theatreCat 