Don’t look glum chum, your play’s a cracker
Apologia (Trafalgar Studios) Verdict: A radical reinvention
GOOD grief, what has Stockard Channing done to her face? The septuagenarian American has arrived at London’s Trafalgar Studios for a four-month starring role in a play about an embittered old Sixties radical.
The show has its lively moments, but for much of the first few minutes I was so astonished by Miss Channing’s startled-peke appearance, I could barely clock the plot.
Let us be positive and accept she was ‘ in character’ as Kristin, a U. S. art historian who moved to Britain years ago and is about to celebrate her birthday with her two sons, their girlfriends and her gay friend Hugh (Desmond Barrit, camping it up — groan — like something from a Fifties radio show).
The action takes place in Kristin’s cluttered kitchen. A sloping glass ceiling on Soutra Gilmour’s accomplished set allows us to see what time of day it is and how much it is raining outside.
As we may glean from the fact that Guardian columnist Polly Toynbee has written an essay for the show’s programme, Kristin symbolises the antiquated Left. She was a pioneer peacenik and bra burner back in the incendiary days of the Vietnam War and Woodstock.
Softie Hugh nostalgically recalls how they threw eggs at the U.S. embassy in London. He tells Kristin’s banker son Peter that she was magnificent in her prime. Yet Peter and his damaged brother Simon (both parts played well by Joseph Millson) feel aggrieved that ‘the old commie’ neglected them.
Writer Alexi Kaye Campbell certainly takes us on to refreshingly different ground. The first-half dialogue crackles as the more Right- wing youngsters confront comically acidic Kristin.
WHATa miserable prune she is, eaten away by scepticism and appalled when Peter and his American fiancee Trudi (Laura Carmichael) say that they met at a church prayer group.
She is incapable of seeing that today’s churchgoers may be just as bold as were those hippies in the age of LBJ.
Miss Carmichael gives a tidy performance as trite Trudi, whose maddening cliches slowly abate to reveal a more likeable figure. With Freema Agyeman arriving as the soap-actress girlfriend of poor Simon, there is initially plenty of watchable give-and-take as the characters argue about values: are today’s thirty- somethings too selfish, too politically disengaged?
It is bad luck on Campbell and his producers that recent British election results suggest the opposite.
Energy levels and the urgency of the writing drop in a second half dominated by an implausible story about how Simon was abandoned as a boy. The show ends more in a dribble than a bang. Though I was quite taken by the play’s more polemical moments, I feel I should issue two warnings: there is much bad language, with one joke in particular depending on a graphic sexual reference; and the Trafalgar Studios must surely be the most hideously uncomfortable theatre in London.
As for Miss Channing, when it comes to playing sad, slightly shaky ladies who look as though they have done too many rounds with Joe Bugner — all tunnel stares and lips like chlorinewashed chicken fillets — she is surely any casting director’s go-to woman.