Opinon: Two Literary Greats, One Done Well and One Done Wrongly

(London Theater Reviews)

LONDON

What happens when a director seems not to trust her play, or maybe her audience? The answer can be discovered at the Vaudeville Theater here, where Kathy Burke’s production of Oscar Wilde’s “Lady Windermere’s Fan” barreled into view on Monday night.

The play, which follows a much better production of “A Woman of No Importance,” is the second in a yearlong lineup of Wilde titles at this playhouse, and runs until April 7.

Its dismaying lack of delicacy is ill-suited to Wilde, a writer who, if anything, can often seem fey and arch.

As if to counter that possibility, Burke, herself an acclaimed actress from films like “Nil by Mouth,” opts for protracted double takes and hammy exaggerations to buoy an abridged version of the 1892 play, which has far more resonance and emotion than are allowed to surface on this occasion.

In the secondary role of the Duchess of Berwick, the comedian and TV star Jennifer Saunders (“Absolutely Fabulous”) is at once the show’s commercial draw and the cause of its imbalance. Making a rare theatrical appearance, she is required mostly to bustle imperiously about, lobbing insults at her hapless daughter, Agatha (a game Ami Metcalf), and narrowing her eyes when about to land an especially withering remark. She returns after the intermission to sing a bawdy ditty during a scene change, just to give her supporting character something to do in the second act. Saunders gets her laughs but at the cost of any sense of an ensemble. (The male aristos, for their part, converge in a scene whose physical antics devolve into a routine that could have come from the Keystone Kops.)

In fact, Wilde’s rarely performed text — it was last seen on the West End in 2002 — contains proper currents of feeling in its portrait of a fallen woman, Mrs. Erlynne (Samantha Spiro), who comes briefly back into contact with her daughter, Lady Windermere (Grace Molony, a sweet-faced newcomer). The two haven’t seen each other for many years — and Lady Windermere doesn’t clock Mrs. Erlynne’s real identity.

A critique of Victorian-era social constraints and a gossipy world’s tendency toward snap judgments, “Lady Windermere’s Fan” insists that people aren’t good or evil; they exist as shades of gray. Good luck extracting that from the bluster and anything-for-a-gag approach taken here. Wilde knew in his bones the difference between high comedy and vulgarity, an essential that Burke and company have yet to understand.

As proof of the happy results when a director and a literary titan align, along comes Ian Rickson’s 60th-anniversary production of “The Birthday Party” from a writer, Harold Pinter, who relished language just as much as Wilde, but with very different results. The play is running at the Harold Pinter Theater — how apt! — through April 14.

Not that Pinter’s disorienting amalgam of mirth and menace was particularly welcomed at its 1958 premiere; the play was greeted with general befuddlement until a celebrated review from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times of London alerted readers to the playwright’s singular capacity to disturb and provoke. No matter: The production nonetheless closed after a week.

Its current iteration by contrast looks likely to be London’s first theatrical hit of 2018 — a testament to a starry cast that anchors the piece in a recognizable time and place while allowing its absurdism to shine through. (You can tick off the various textual nods to “Waiting for Godot,” which was first seen in London only several years before “The Birthday Party.”)

The setting is one of those rundown seaside boardinghouses that Pinter would have known firsthand when he used to tour the regions as an actor under the stage name David Baron. You can practically smell the damp rising from behind the cracked wallpaper of the living room set.

The evocatively dreary environs belong to Meg (Zoë Wanamaker) and her husband Petey (Peter Wight), though questions of ownership and control soon come to define the play. The couple have a lodger, Stanley (Toby Jones), who seems to be a surrogate for the son Meg never had. Stanley is a study in unspecified damage, and an unspoken anger courses beneath his blandly bespectacled visage. It’s not altogether surprising when he reaches toward Meg in what looks like an embrace, only to put his hands around her throat.

Petey, a deckchair attendant, keeps absenting himself, allowing Meg and Stanley to pursue their warped interactions unbothered, until into this peculiar trio comes the troubling double-act of Goldberg (Stephen Mangan) and McCann (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor). They have arrived to deliver Stanley to an unseen character called Monty, though who Monty is or what he represents is anyone’s (fearsome) guess.

From this self-enclosed landscape — we never leave the living room — Pinter maps out themes of dominance and usurpation that he would revisit throughout a lifetime of plays that shifted over the years from the domestic to the more overtly political. His gift for ambiguity, too, is everywhere evident: Meg refers more than once to a boardinghouse that is “on the list,” by which she presumably doesn’t mean the tourist itinerary. (Is it under surveillance? Has it been condemned?)

Comedy, of which there is plenty, arises from the characters’ capacity for surprise — Goldberg for no apparent reason sticks out his tongue — and from Pinter’s self-evident delight in the effect of certain words. Wanamaker’s Meg looks taken aback early on by Petey’s use of the adjective “succulent” — one that is clearly more suggestive than she is used to.

As Simon Baker’s sound design ratchets up the tension, the company play with the ensemble ease that is one of the director Rickson’s many gifts. (Nor is he any stranger to Pinter, having directed Pinter as an actor in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” and overseen productions of his plays “Old Times” and “Betrayal.”)

Among a uniformly attuned cast, of whom only Wanamaker is on occasion a tad too studied, it’s worth noting Mangan’s dampening down his natural charm and full coiffeur to play a man on a none-too-cheerful mission: He and the ramrod-straight Vaughan-Lawlor revel in vaudevillian banter toward the end as a chastened, newly captive Stanley looks on motionless.

And in the pivotal role of the piano-playing victim, Jones, known from such films as “Infamous” and the recent “Happy End,” delivers a climactic scream worthy of Edvard Munch. Think of it as the first of Pinter’s many theatrical alarm calls: a cry for help from a writer besotted with language who also knew the forbidding terrain that exists beyond words.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

MATT WOLF © 2018 The New York Times

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