A rum old night in the tropics, but Reverend Owen saves the day
The Night Of The Iguana (Noel Coward Theatre, London) Verdict: Owen is worth the wait ★★★★✩ Vienna 1934 — Munich 1938 ( VUersdticitn: oSwveTeth raemabtlrineg, aBuaditehn) ce with Vanessa Redgrave ★★★✩✩
LAST time we saw Clive Owen in the West End it was just after 9/11, so you could be forgiven for having forgotten the craggy good looks of the star of Mike Hodges’s film Croupier and the Nineties TV show Chancer.
You might even have forgotten he was once touted as a potential James Bond (a rather tasty idea).
In Tennessee Williams’s 1961 drama, though, he’s a very different kettle of fish. Owen plays a spiritually derelict American pastor working as a disreputable tour guide in 1940s Mexico.
A penniless sexual fugitive with a drink problem and deteriorating mental health, we meet him wearing a grimy white linen suit.
I wasn’t sure about him to begin with. Far from a man who had found sanctuary in a seedy hotel, he struck me as merely tetchy about running a fever. I expected him to pull out a pistol and reveal himself to be 007. But he grows in the role impressively.
Fending off the attentions of a teenage girl (Emma Canning), he has to deal with an irate nemesis on the tour bus (Finty Williams).
The only help he gets is from the hotel’s recently widowed but no less lubricious manager — a fabulous Anna Gunn. She’s best known as Bryan Cranston’s wife in Breaking Bad on Netflix, but here she’s a gloriously ravenous sexual predator.
Lia Williams, meanwhile, is a waif-like New England artist and gives a fine porcelain performance of mysterious beauty. And as her ancient grandfather, Game Of Thrones’ Julian Glover is a 19th-century relic who erupts into Homeric verse.
The play was cobbled together by Tennessee Williams from various dangerous experiences, fuelled by rum-cocos, in the tropics. It features a ludicrous set of Benny- Hill- style Germans in swimsuits celebrating Nazi successes in World War II.
I didn’t get much sense of the precipitous landscape from Rae Smith’s cramped set of tumbledown shacks cowering beneath a fibreglass rock. Large sections of the stalls actually have a restricted view thanks to a balustrade at the front of the stage.
But if you think you can hack
a three-hour trek into the foggy mind of a sweaty outcast, let Owen be your guide. Like Richard Burton in the film version, Owen is a class act with range and charisma.
Without him, James Macdonald’s production might veer off the plot’s hairpin bends and plunge into the Pacific. n Vienna 1934 — Munich 1938 is an audience with Vanessa Redgrave.
She’s been rummaging around in the family attic and has stitched together a sweetly rambling account of friends and associates of her father and mother during the 1930s. When your parents were theatrical royalty like Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, namedropping is inevitable.
Even so, Vanessa’s recollection of Noel Coward coming upstairs to say goodnight when she was a child is irresistible.
THE main thrust, however, is political. Redgrave, like the rest of her family, has been a lifelong socialist. Reading from a ring-binder file, she outlines the baroque antifascist activities in Vienna of the poet and family friend Stephen
Spender and American heiress Muriel Gardiner (Lucy Doyle). After the interval her father’s bisexuality is explored in depth; and the show closes with actor Paul Hilton delivering a lecture by the German novelist Thomas Mann, blaming British appeasement of Hitler for the war. Hardly an original thesis. The best bit is Redgrave’s reading of Spender’s poem Ultima Ratio Regum about a child killed in the Spanish Civil War.
As an 82-year-old who’s had a heart attack and functions on 30 per cent lung capacity, she’s phenomenally impressive and has still got it on stage.