We picked the wettest night of the year. Outside the Apollo we dodged puddles in Rupert Street as it bucketed down. Inside it was dry, at least for the audience, but the cast weren't so lucky in the second half, facing repeated soakings at the front of the proscenium stage. Those in the audience who had come to see James McAvoy caught their breath as they saw him getting soaked wearing only his pyjamas. Will he survive this kind of treatment? Luckily there is an understudy. McAvoy has great depths as an actor and is well worth seeing in this three-hander, a revival of a play by Richard Greenberg first seen at the Donmar a decade or so ago. Former Donmar director Sam Mendes has a hand in this show through his production company, and there are other Donmar connections too. Both McAvoy and Nigel Harman were in a splendid production of Privates On Parade there about eight years ago for which Roger Allam deservedly won an Olivier Best Actor award. Harman I found unconvincing, but the third member of the rain-soaked trio, Lyndsey Marshal, was outstanding. The problem that made this a disappointing, watch-inspecting evening for me was not the acting or the direction by Jamie Lloyd (another Donmar alumnus), but the play. Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out, performed in London in about 2002, was about how baseball copes, or fails to cope, with homosexuality in the locker-room. It was marred by the use of a trick that only bad or lazy playwrights use -- an expositional character who marches up to the footlights to speak directly to the audience and explain the bits of the story the writer can't or won't show on stage. That's the kind of device that tends to kill drama stone dead in modern plays, although I know Shakespeare used it. Greenberg uses it again in this play, for obvious technical reasons. What do you do when three people meet, all of whom have known each other since childhood, and you have to explain their complicated backstory without relapsing into speeches that begin 'Do you remember when...?' One of the trio (the unstable drifter Walker, played by McAvoy) has disappeared to Italy and been incommunicado for a year. It's the death of their father Ned, an incommunicative but very successful architect, that reunites Walker and Nan with Pip, the actor son of the architect's partner Theo. The first act has a few twists and turns and a few skeletons tumble out of long-locked closets, but then lie gathering dust on the stage. There are echoes of Arthur Miller's The Price, but the writing isn't as good and the moral issues at stake are fuzzy. The action fails to spring to life before the interval because the focus is relentlessly backwards on what happened to Ned, his wife Lina (still alive but in the funny farm) and Theo in the 1960s. The children discover a dirty old journal in the dust-encrusted Manhattan loft where the famous architectural practice began; they dip into it but it hides more than it reveals. They stumble on a cryptic reference to 'three days of rain' but can only guess at its meaning. At the end of Act One, the diary gets burned. This struck me as phoney and poorly motivated, just a device to bring the first half to a climax.
In Act Two the same three actors go back to 1960s and become the parents. McAvoy changes from an unstable neurotic to a diffident, stuttering young architect who is convinced that his partner Theo is the genius with all the talent. Marshal undergoes a striking transformation from a sensible, conventional mother-of-two from Boston to a southern belle whose behaviour gives a nod to Tennessee Williams and shows she has only a short journey to travel to madness and alcoholism. Harman plays Theo, the architect partner who died young. What the second half reveals is that the children have understood nothing at all about their parents' lives. Theo turns out not to have been a genius after all, but he was Lina's lover before she seduced Ned during the three days of rain. Overall, the play doesn't work; Pinter and Stoppard have written far better works about the mystery of the past, using flashbacks and sometimes reversing the order of events. In a conventional past-and-present play like The Price, characters discover and confront the truth about the past, and are changed by it, but that doesn't happen here. In Betrayal, Pinter sets up a complicated form of dramatic irony because the audience always knows what happens next, having already seen the subsequent twists and turns and fizzling out of an adulterous relationship. But here Act One features children who hadn't been born when Act Two takes place. There's no dramatic irony in the first half, and not much in the second. Here we get just two plays, one set 30 years earlier than the other, and there are no real dramatic links between them. The only truth we take away is that we are doomed to misunderstand our parents' early lives. Stoppard's Arcadia is a far superior play about the impossibility of understanding the past, and he resolves it with a magical scene at the end when the past and present merge into each other. Greenberg lacks this kind of fluidity. If I could have engaged or sympathised with the characters, I would have enjoyed the play nonetheless, but I really couldn't care about any of them. Lyndsey Marshal, however, is a name to watch out for. Let's hope she doesn't catch pneumonia on stage.
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