Kendal’s Lettice lacks Maggie’s crispness
Lettice and Lovage Menier Chocolate Factory
Two words explain the tremendous commercial success of Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage when it opened in the West End in 1987: “Maggie” and “Smith”.
Smith starred as Lettice Douffet, a Wiltshire Tudor manor tour guide whose wild yarn-spinning in aid of enhancing the visitor experience lands her in trouble but gains her an unlikely friend in the shape of the “Preservation Trust” snoop who dismisses her. The role was specially created for her, and her performance became the talk of the town – and later on Broadway, where she won a Tony Award for Best Actress.
I’m afraid that Felicity Kendal, little less loved by the public at large, will be lucky to be the talk of Southwark, so much does she struggle at the Menier Chocolate Factory to make comic headway with – and emotional sense of – this spinsterish standard-bearer for eccentricity and imagination in a world of grey conformity.
In a sense, it’s the air of struggle itself that’s the problem with this passingly entertaining yet effortful-feeling revival by Trevor Nunn (the first London one since the premiere). If you lay aside Dame Maggie’s inimitable qualities, she gave a few useful broad pointers in a brief but hilarious reprisal of the part during an NT celebration of the late playwright’s life and work last month. Smith served the arias of arrant tosh as though she were performing Shakespeare: imperious, off-hand, deadpan – communicating in her disdain the aristocratic hauteur of those who come to regard the stately homes which they merely tend as somehow their own property.
A ginger-bobbed (arguably too chic, and strikingly wrinkle-free) Kendal, by contrast, displays a kittenish eagerness to please, playing her impish adorability off against incongruous bursts of manly gruffness. She offers a frantic, faintly exhausting repertoire of bulged eyes, jutted jaws and clasped hands, her character’s impulsive improvisations at high risk of sounding scripted. Which isn’t to say we don’t warm to her, or find her funny at points, it’s just that, even as the action moves to her forlorn Earl’s Court basement flat (complete with cat, too obviously stuffed), we don’t get behind the winsome façade.
You fall with relief on the understatement of Maureen Lipman’s sniffily disapproving Lotte (Margo, as The Good Life fans might have it, to Kendal’s Barbara). This no-nonsense stickler for accuracy feels remorse for giving the renegade the chop, bonds with her via deranged stabs at historical re-enactment and, finally, vows to join her in an anti-philistine crusade.
Stirringly eloquent about European civilisation and the Luftwaffe-like damage done by post-war urban planners, Lipman (iffy Teutonic accent aside) can make a raised eyebrow amusing and almost brings the house down as she histrionically gags, as if choking on fur-balls, at the sight of Lettice’s feline companion. When the pair start reeling, drunk on home-made Elizabethan cordial (seasoned with the herb lovage), the double-act finally stirs to life. But overall this rather tired Lettice needs greater pep, charm and calm to justify its almost sold-out run or qualify for a West End transfer.
Until July 8. Tickets: 020 7378 1713; menierchocolatefactory.com