HOLLYWOOD AND HYPOCRISY
It’s a brilliant moment for this sharp bit of work from the American Michael McKeever to land at the Elephant with a bracing thump. We’ve got Trump at his UK banquet, crowds flocking down Whitehall to condemn him , rows on every side about free speech, morality and identity. Not to mention the devout religiosity of the late Charlie Kirk’s arguments , and the President’s recent purging of the Kennedy Centre for arts for hosting drag queens. Freedom, coercion, rebellious queerness and power: it’s all here , under a mischievously battered HOLLYWOODLAND proscenium, as if the West was in a twisted way echoing the 1934-1968’s moment when the Hays Code restricted the film industry’s “moral standards’. The moment certainly gave the 90-minute show – set in 1950 – extra bite.
It’s a drinks party in the coolly chic home of Billy Haines, once a major 1920’s star and now – after refusing to give up his gay lover and have a “lavender marriage” – working as a smart interior designer. His friend Tallulah Bankhead is there, lounging, smoking, drinking and reminiscing outrageously about her liaisons and the free old days when you could swing from a chandelier with no underwear and get applauded for it. She is longing to get the part of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, if Warner Bros will agree.
Henry Willson, a sharp agent, turns up with a young protegé he has rechristened for stardom as Chad Manford, (Willson is a real character, like the others, Chad an invention). He rather maliciously lets drop the news that the role has gone to Gertrude Lawrence. Explosion from Tallulah , about how the more respectable Lawrence should get back to Noel Coward roles where she belongs. She’s still not over losing Scarlett in Gone with the Wind and reckons Vivien Leigh got that by sexual favours. Not that Tallulah would use an expression as prim as that.
Tracie Bennett is wonderful in the part: appearing first in elegant profile, sometimes pausing the action to comment on what’s going on, addressing us through the fourth wall with teasing aplomb. At first I thought her slinking, posing, head-tossing diva sinuosity might be overdone, but after a few moments saw that Bennett was utterly into the reality of a woman who had flourished that way, set herself in the role , enjoyed it and used it for devastating humour at the expense of hypocritical Hollywood. Later, in the extreme crisis of the show, she gives us a Tallulah more than able to be still, concentrated, tensely watchful as a cat . It’s masterful.
But the story is about the men, and the prim cruelties of Hays-Code Hollywood. Nick Blakeley is the chilly, coercive agent Henry, in a moment alone with Billy solicits a favour: young Chad has a housemate, an artist who is probably a gay partner: could Henry remove the danger by giving the housemate a studio design job? Chad, naively, hears of this and says no, they were in the army together, supported each other, and the deal was that once his acting career took off, his partner would be a fulltime painter .
Henry slams that down hard, physically and explicitly condemning his gayness. “The person that you think you are does not exist, he died on the battlefields of Normandy. You are just an idea in my mind. A story”.
When Billy sees what is happening he backs Chad. He and Tallulah tell the astonished kid how it has always worked since the new morality, shocking him no end with the names. “Cary Grant is GAY?”cries poor Chad . They cite him, Valentino, Navarro, other men who unlike Billy agreed to play safe and hetero but in doing so forfeited their real happiness in life. Henry sneers that it’s necessary, because “simple, unassuming people” in middle America need safe league-of-decency approved chaps and plots, “Disney and Gene Kelly”. In a properly horrifing sequence he forces Chad to ring his partner at home and – dictating the words in a low hiss behind him – to tell him that with his new starring ambitions it’s over.
Tallulah and Billy are left, reflecting. McKeever’s script rather overuses the now too-fashionable word and idea of “authenticity”: being your total real self all the time, rather than merely demanding tolerance of private life and a lack of prurient stigma. But it strikes home in the dramatic setting; these men did suffer, were coerced. And there is a bracing healthiness in the Tallulah style of exuberant bisexual disgracefulness and support of gay friends. It’s a great evening, anyway: all four of the players – not least young Solomon Davy as handsome, ambitious, manipulated Chad – are spot-on. And you’ll remember Tracie Bennett’s wild serpentine Tallulah for a good while…
southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 11 oct
Rating 4
theatreCat 