Oy vay. The Lyttelton stage in the National Theatre may have seen more weakly written plays than Nicholas Wright's schmaltzy fantasy about the origins of Hollywood, but I can't think of one. It's a classic proof that an exciting original idea isn't enough to create a good show -- you have to execute it.
What were they thinking of down on the South Bank? Actually, there's no great mystery here. It must have seemed a no-brainer for Nicholas Hytner. Wright is high up on the ladder of our most distinguished senior playwrights, with a good track record at the National. A decade ago, as an Olivier awards judge, I was thrilled when his play about the young Van Gogh, Vincent in Brixton, won the trophy for best play. Since then he's written The Reporter, an edgy drama about a BBC TV newsman who killed himself, and more recently The Last of the Duchess at the Hampstead Theatre. Add to that the presence in the cast of Antony Sher, and you can understand why Hytner arranged before the opening for the production to tour to Salford, Leeds, Aylesbury and Newcastle and to be shown live in cinemas this month.
It's unfortunate that this play about the beginnings of cinema should arrive at the same time as the film The Artist, which also works over the cliches and tropes of early silent cinema but manages to create something wholly original. In this play the characters remain resolutely one-dimensional, the dialogue struggles to find a consistent language, and there is a lack of real plot and conflict. The moments of drama in the second act seem artificial and contrived. In short, watching this play is like trying to eat a bagel before it is cooked. As my Viennese Jewish great-great-grandfather Bernhard might well have remarked, Es is' a Schmaeh!
Wright's idea is to work backwards from the legendary Jewish film moguls who dominated the early years of Hollywood -- Sam Goldwyn, Louis B Mayer et al -- and imagine a backstory in the shtetl of Tsarist Russia. What if our hero, equipped with an early cinematograph from the brothers Lumiere, were to invent the language of cinema in the world of Fiddler on the Roof? Motl Mendl, a bright young Jewish lad played by Damien Molony, is spurred into film-making around the village by local timber merchant Jacob Bindel (Antony Sher). But the sponsorship has strings; Bindel wants not just to finance the 'motion picture' but also to have the final cut, and he has designs on Anna, Motl's leading lady. Jacob is illiterate and inarticulate in any language, but some of his ideas about film are right on the money; he even thinks up the plot of Ernst Lubitsch's film The Shop Around The Corner. Eventually, of course, there's a crisis and Motl escapes to Hollywood, in the delusional expectation on that he will find artistic and budgetary freedom. At various points in the action he speak to the audience as his future self, the prosperous film mogul Maurice Montgomery.
Yes, it's a nice, if whimsical idea. But the audience's unenthusiastic reaction at the end of Tuesday's performance -- lukewarm applause and a single curtain call -- is proof that the play doesn't deliver. As so often, it's not the fault of the actors. Sher plays Jacob with old-fashioned gusto, massacring the language (English/Russian/Yiddish/Polish) into near incomprehensibility. Young Damien Molony wisely doesn't try to compete with this vaudeville turn, but his acting seems wholly directed at his fellow cast members and never at the audience. There's a rather superfluous flash forward scene at the end in which he plays a young actor from Brooklyn, and the story comes full circle. The set by Bob Crowley is excellent, and so are Vicki Mortimer's costumes, but they cannot rescue a script with so many weaknesses. There is an interesting comparison to be written about the use of pastiche and parody in this play and in The Artist; it seems to me the film succeeds because its characters never step outside their silent-movie selves; it leaves the viewer to see the story in a different perspective, without being too knowing. Springtime for Hitler, another successful pastiche, works in the same way. Wright's play, by contrast, is far too knowing for its own good, with its references to filming washerwomen in wet blouses; it might have worked if the writer had concentrated less on the high concept ideas and more on deepening the characters and the perfunctory storyline. In a story set in a Jewish shtetl, there's one curious and rather telling omission. This is a play with no meaningful family relationships at all. Motl has no parents, only a convenient aunt; Anna is an orphan brought up in a convent, and Jacob's son is absent, drafted into the Tsarist army.
So why did this play get put on? For why peoples must see this play? (Jacob Bindel's use of language is catching.) The National is like a vast ocean liner; when the normally brilliant captain steers a course close to the rocks, nobody else is in a position to grab the wheel and put the engines in reverse. Hytner's predecessors have faced similar dilemmas when commissioned work by top-drawer authors has fallen short, and have generally opted to press ahead. In Trevor Nunn's case this meant staging Tom Stoppard's wordy trilogy The Coast of Utopia rather than sending him away to turn it into a single play; under Eyre, Nunn and Hytner the National has staged several less-than-impressive plays by David Hare. In this case Hytner may simply not have been ruthless enough to jeopardise his relationship with the playwright by pulling the plug on this production. But it might have been better for his relationship with the National's paying audience -- what Jacob Bindel would call peoples -- if he had done so.
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