Damian Lewis needs to find his serious side
The Goat Or, Who Is Sylvia?
Theatre Royal Haymarket ★★★ ★★
Mounting a revival of the late Edward Albee’s funnypeculiar play of 2002 around the corner from a superlative staging of his early masterpiece,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, is like parking a dusty jalopy next to gleaming Cadillac. Sure, there’s a value to compare-and-contrast; and it can be argued, too, that the jalopy offers the more arresting spectacle, seeing as how The Goat’s highly provocative marital scenario involves an architect who has fallen – truly, madly, deeply – in love with, yep, a goat. Yet, given the choice, I know which I’d rather plump for, and Ian Rickson’s account of a work that was in the West End not so many moons ago (2004, a transfer from the Almeida) does it few favours.
How can that be, you ask, when it stars Damian Lewis, much respected and more bankable, thanks to his TV work, than Jonathan Pryce, who took the dazed, confused, smitten role back then? Yet this is the third time Lewis has starred in a West End vehicle with a strong comic component (albeit playfully subtitled “Notes Towards a Definition of Tragedy”, a goat supposedly being the prize sought by vying Greek poets of old). And it’s high time someone – his agent? – told him stage comedy isn’t his strongest suit.
Just as with American Buffalo two years ago (he was far more persuasive in Molière’s The Misanthrope, opposite Keira Knightley back in 2009), he’s gone for a very full American accent and such a hefty side-order of mannerisms that it almost capsizes the performance.
All he has to do early on – a middle-aged man, reeling from his 50th birthday and fretting in front of his wife (Sophie Okonedo’s Stevie) about his alarming forgetfulness – is signal professional confidence, personal cluelessness and a hint of suppressed revelation. But with sharply angled movements, oddball nasal inflections and unsubtly semaphored Little Boy Lost behaviour, Lewis seems to be impersonating a deeply troubled American male, not inhabiting the mindset.
The evening begins on the backfoot, putting a strain on Albee’s arch tone: the couple’s would-be insouciant adopting of Noël Cowardy cross-talk as the hint of an affair first surfaces and is jovially batted away, is almost excruciating, conveying little existing genuine marital connection. Awkward, too, is the home visit, for a fawning video-recording, by old friend Ross (Jason Hughes). The dialogue is flat, it all smells off.
Where Pryce was memorably dishevelled, distracted, haunted, Lewis gathers the requisite intensity only in the second half of this interval-less affair, standing absurdly, movingly firm in defence of his “sweetheart”, recalling her bewitching eyes and devoted air. How love relates to sexual desire is Albee’s high-minded theme, leavened by expletives and reiterated expostulations of disbelief, as the family (which includes an understandably bewildered gay son with an unusual Oedipal complex) implodes in a shower of smashed objets d’art.
I began, just, to believe the hurt in Okonedo’s rage (the rage of all those betrayed by infidelity) and the final desolation of Albee’s protagonist. I remain goat-stubborn in my belief, though, that this could be better. Until June 24. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; TheGoatPlay.com