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Both Keiths hit the mark
Good Grief Malvern Festival Theatre **** KEITH
Waterhouse died three years ago, aged 80. He was the Leeds-born half of
the unrivalled Waterhouse-Willis Hall scriptwriting team, who in the
1950s and 60s scripted Billy Liar
(Tom Courtenay and before him, Albert
Finney), the hit children's film
Whistle Down the Wind (with Hayley
Mills) and the Stan Barstow adaptation
A Kind of Loving. Later, alone,
Waterhouse wrote his take on the lovable journalistic sot (‘a world
class carouser') Jeffrey Bernard, immortalised as a prating barfly by
his fellow Yorkshireman Peter O'Toole.
The northern strand runs through his work – like
Alan Sillitoe's Nottingham background through his – as a signal feature.
His four-man play Good Grief, based on his best-selling novel and
currently touring to Malvern, reads a bit like an Alan Bennett script:
pithy, well-calculated, chock-full of chucklesome one-liners and often
enough - Waterhouse being a first-class journalist - right on the nub. However it is a Lancashire accent that Good
Grief calls forth from Penelope Keith, taking on the play's lead
role. Initially that's mildly disconcerting: neither manor (to which
born) nor Surrey (of which Miss Keith was High Sheriff in 2002-3!). Is
she well cast? Such is her commanding stage presence, changeable
personality and very dexterous timing that yes, she is. Once Keith settles into the accent she (almost)
maintains it. It's not overbearing, just there, and colours the moodily
muttered confidences of June Pepper, who has just lost her drunken
editor husband (yes, another journalistic sot) Sam, and is striving -
angry, hurt and bewildered beneath the bravado - to work out what best
to do with widowhood (‘They should have a school for widows').
Keith's moves teeter between the elegant and
clumsy, as if negotiating clutter, but always in character. Her
assurance suggests she is someone who has moved others: and indeed, she
herself has directed several times. Though the experienced director Tom
Littler effects few surprises and exercises little invention with the
entrances and exits, or indeed the onstage business, her entries are
always slick; more so, perhaps, than her departures. Into June's life emerge three others: her
step-daughter Pauline (Flora Montgomery), a pushy, self-centred but
essentially normal young twenty-something; a tiresome, Machiavellian
newspaper office stunted rising star (Jonathan Firth) who may or may not
be the filly's bit of stuff (he isn't); and a delicious curio, Douglas
(Christopher Ravenscroft) whom June collects on periodic lonesome visits
to the pub (The Clarence Arms, I think it was), who gradually
begins to look like a confidence trickster. Later hauled by June up towards bed (‘I suppose a
fuck's out of the question?'), a non-event abruptly terminated before it
begins - he is then lit upon rogering the daughter, revealing himself a
not-so-gullible rogue of a different hue. By now a full-flung situation
comedy (semi-hilarious but now less convincing), Good Grief
acquires a whiff near the end of Entertaining Mr. Sloane; Joe
Orton stemmed from the same Fifties-Osborne era that Waterhouse and Hall
represented The farcical sexy bit is deliberately
unpersuasive. Desirable though Ravenscroft – some may remember his
ultra-pure Henry Tudor in the RSC (Anthony Sher's) Richard III;
he also surfaced in Branagh's film of Henry V - might seem as a
shy beddable catch for mother or daughter, but it's breathtakingly
unlikely with either. Ravenscroft's beautifully invented character - is
a bumbling figure. Maybe it's the pub that suggests it, but he's a dead
ringer for Ford in RSC's updated The Merry Wives of Windsor:
Nicky Henson played it gloriously opposite Peter Jeffery - an exact
contemporary of Waterhouse's - in a similar garb and manner.
Hesitant, more than a bit lost, Douglas is amazed to be talked to. Ravenscroft has a clutter of old geezer gestures, never overstated; all the joints – knees, shoulders, hips – have a wonderful incipient ancientness: widowed, not quite lonely, gently potty, he looks a candidate for Last of the Summer Wine. Douglas (Christopher Ravenscroft) in his habitat, the pub, with Penelope Keith as June Two curious, but focal, details are that he has
purchased June's husband's suit from Oxfam – a joyous and embarrassing
coincidence milked for its comedy (hence she dubs him ‘The Suit'); and
has a misguided notion that he can reemploy himself as a handyman, a
skill for which he patently, in a slapstick offstage exchange about a
delinquent fridge door, has no aptitude.
Jonathan Firth. recently a Prince Hal for the BBC, and with more TV – he's something of a period drama heartthrob - than stage credits (but you wouldn't think so) looks even here like a Henry V, rather than the saintly Henry VI, whom he recently played for the RSC (the latter would have fitted Ravenscroft like a glove: rivalling, perhaps, the legendary, David Warner performance. Queer that Warner has ended up a Hollywood villain). Firth's character is a spasmodic bit-part, rather
underused: he is possibly a bit too young, although the pertly delivered
actual words well suit the whippersnapper he concocts here. He does the
suave, smug, intrusive character of Eric perfectly; his brother Colin
would have done no better. The doomed young offspring of Ralph Fiennes
in the 1992 film Wuthering Heights, he looks and feels more like
Heathcliff himself. Happy to push at the door, humiliatingly worsted by
Keith's furious, outraged June, he always bounces back, armed with
jabbing, wildly circling gestures and a ghastly, cynical smile.
Flora Montgomery (the daughter, Pauline)
delighted without ever hogging the stage. Pauline's initial ‘concern'
for a woman she essentially despises sets up some of the best ironies of
the play in the opening scene with the increasingly irritated, instantly
bitchy June. (June has no child, note: here in part originates her
needless, unfair, gut resentment of Pauline.) Both have brief moments of
inaudibility – Keith at the start, Montgomery at the point where a
crucial revealing letter to the dead man is read out in tandem - not to
best effect. But the mostly retired, appreciative Malvern
audience didn't mind one jot – they laughed at all the right points, and
only one hearing aid went off, so maybe it was just me. It was
interesting, in Simon Kenny's designs for an updated setting in the
present, to see the relative (black) skirt lengths: June's just, but
scarcely, below the knee, for a woman her age (what age?); Pauline's
almost a long dress. Both looked stylish.
Waterhouse's text is crammed full of nuggets, but
the essential ones are embedded in the caustic exchanges that Keith – a
bit of a naïve cad in her youth, which is how she prised him from
Pauline's mother (‘then, I was the other woman') – has with her
erstwhile husband of some 25 years-plus, Sam Pepper.
The artfulness of this Sam/silent interlocutor
device is that it allows Keith's June to talk to the audience. We become
him – and this creates an immediate bond from the stalls with the
grieving widow – or not so grieving (or both) onstage. The effect is not
unlike Meryl Streep addressing Jim Broadbent (as late husband Denys
Thatcher) in The Iron Lady. The wit of Penelope Keith's almost
stand-up one-liners supplies almost the whole of the play's delight:
witness the vodka she stores (a toper like her late spouse) ‘on her
bedside table' (the brandy is in the bedroom cupboard); or the Aeros she
squirrels away daily (‘It used to be Rolos, but they're habit-forming').
Wonderfully prickly, too: ‘I'm not on my own, Eric'; ‘It's not
like measles'; ‘It's a bereavement I've suffered, not a stroke' (that's
certainly Bennett: both are rooted in Oscar Wilde, and probably
Restoration Comedy too).
June bemoans fangly instructions on utilities
(usually ‘in Japanese'); and ‘slavering tabloid hacks', a role her
husband, in her mind, narrowly avoided, preferring drink: this being a
propensity shared with the author himself and his contemporaries, like
Victor Mulchrone of the Daily Mail (Waterhouse had a 1950s
twice-weekly column for the Daily Mirror). How does one know
this? One of the treats of this event came with it: Bill Hagerty's
beautifully crafted, knowledgeable and funnily celebratory programme
note on Fleet Street of that era: he was the Mirror's Deputy
Editor, and then edited The People; so he should know. Simon Kenny's set characterfully alternated
between June's spacious though not lavish home and the pub, the latter
rolled effortlessly out from below a movable stairway (there was just
one hitch, which briefly introduced an unplanned black-clad character to
the cast rearstage; had Waterhouse been there to notice, he might have
used it) and neatly boxed in from above. It supplied three main entries,
and Keith's astonishingly deft costume changes, effected between them,
suggested an on-the-ball, proficient touring backstage crew, overseen by
Simon Bannister and Suu [sic] Wernham.
Three understudies (Freya Dominic; Julia Goulding;
and Grahame Edwards for both male roles: his age might have better
suited the Eric character, whose promotion Sam has spiked) were hauled
onstage momentarily in almost (almost insultingly) non-existent roles: a
pity Waterhouse (or director Tom Littler, unostentatious but endlessly
competent in a safe Peter Hall kind of way), didn't think to give them
something more. There must be talent there: Dominic, Keith's understudy, plays Shakespeare, Euripides and more than a touch of Wilde, including for the Birmingham Rep; Goulding, just a year into a growing career, has done Shakespeare (including Othello), Miller and Chaucer. Edwards is a Toby Belch, Claudius and Prospero. I think even I could have thought up some extra work for them. Barmaid and Guests in the pub? It didn't work. The music (Simon Dennis) seemed a bit of a
mishmash, and could have been much cleverer. Given what June says about
the Fleet Street funeral (presumably at St. Bride's, the journalists'
church), Parry's ‘I was glad', or its organ introduction, seemed utterly
inappropriate: as if a wedding piece had been frantically grabbed off
the hook. (Why not Wagner or Mendelsssohn?) Some of the remaining sound
score made allusion; much of it insipid. The offstage sounds were
unbelievably underused and undermiked. But Tim Mascall's Lighting Design
worked well enough: a bit bland for the house interior (perhaps
accurately so) but well aimed where necessary, and with some use of bald
whites to point up certain moments.
Whether Waterhouse and Hall were in the
auditorium with us in spirit, one can't say; but maybe they were. This
artfully staged Good Grief was a fine tribute to a writer who was
up there with the best. To 17-11-12 Roderic Dunnett 14-11-12
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