You’ll fall for Hancock’s lovable rebel
AT THE tender age of 85, Sheila Hancock is back on the stage playing Maude, a freespirited widow whose liberal approach to life so enchants a morose American teenager that he falls in love with her.
Colin Higgins’s story was a terrific, zany 1971 film. This stage version may not quite hit those heights, but it has a surreal sweetness. Thom Southerland directs with what is now his trademark troubadour musicality, members of the small cast doubling-up as instrumentalists.
The story is set in earlySeventies America, with a sense of the young fighting to shake off adult oppression.
Harold and Maude (Charing Cross Theatre) Verdict: Surreally sweet
Maude and Harold meet at a funeral. Neither of them knows the deceased person, they are just keen groupies.
Harold, who comes from a rich family, is trying to escape his mother (a vampish turn from Rebecca Caine), while Maude is old enough to know that life is more fun if you tell authority to get lost.
She borrows cars, forgets bills, flutters her eyelashes at the police and is quite the prototype hippy. This is very much a Hancock creation, more benevolent and less punchy than Ruth Gordon’s film version. She has a luminous quality, her blue eyes radiating innocent wonderment at the world’s possibilities.
Harold is played impressively by Bill Milner. The play opens with him staging another of his fake suicides, his mother walking casually into the room as he swings from a noose, only to tell him to please get dressed for dinner.
The pace is slow at first, but things pick up and, although the story has lost some of its Nixon- era rebelliousness, Harold’s love for Maude is touchingly convincing.