Stockard blooms as brittle boomer
Aplay about “bad” Sixties mothers and their neglected/ abandoned-feeling offspring, Alexi Kaye Campbell’s Apologia earned a strongish set of reviews when it premiered at the Bush in 2009, coming hard on the heels of The Pride, his breakthrough debut contrasting gay lives of the Fifties with “now”.
That piece was skilfully revived by Jamie Lloyd at Trafalgar Studios four years ago, and the director – always at his best when he’s not showing off – does the honours here again, with a production that brings Stockard Channing to the West End for the first time since 1992, when she appeared to glowing notices in
Six Degrees of Separation. There’s a poignancy to the casting: to millions, Channing will remain forever young as the tough-acting Rizzo in Grease. Now here she is, at 73, playing leftwing American art-historian Kristin, who’s facing the recriminatory music of her grown-up sons at her own birthday party (at home in the English countryside). Whatever she has done, or hasn’t done, in the past has been compounded by a recent memoir that doesn’t mention her boys.
The curiosity value of the production is high – even if you can’t help querying the commercial wisdom of opening the show in August, when the kind of affluent, middle-class baby boomers it will most obviously speak to are off sunning themselves in Tuscany, or wherever.
Actually it was in Florence that Kristin seems to have forfeited her claim to filial affection: it transpires that, post-divorce, she allegedly made insufficient attempts to hold on to Peter, now an international banker, and Simon, now a half-crazed writer, after their father took them. She cared about the work of Giotto; did she give a jot about mothering?
Channing, slowly roaming and often seated in a capacious kitchen (enticingly realised by designer Soutra Gilmour), has most of the best lines of the evening, Kristin displaying an almost Lady Bracknellesque ability to scrutinise and find wanting those who come within her gaze. It’s a gaze magnificently communicated in Channing’s withheld performance, so that even when she’s doing no more than narrowing her eyes, or letting them lose focus and wander, she speaks volumes of irritation and contempt.
There are two (rather, too) easy foils for the character’s wit in the shape of Simon’s fashion-conscious (therefore assumed to be shallow) partner Claire, a soap actress, and Peter’s all-american, fervent Christian girlfriend Trudi, who majors in cheerleader optimism. Retorting to the latter’s Obama-era expression of hope in her country’s future, Channing’s waspish hostess deadpans, “Let’s wait and see how things turn out in the long run before we start jumping with joy” – getting one of the big laughs of the night.
You can complain that the first half, further enlivened by the arch interjections of Kristin’s ageing gay acolyte Hugh (Desmond Barrit, lending what depth he can to an exercise in bolstering camp), hardly gives us a dinner-party to remember. Yet the separate confrontations with her two sons – so separate they allow Joseph Millson to take both roles, with laurels – pushes the conversational needling into a terrain of loss that strikes at the heart of questions about parenting, career-making and homemaking, framed within the context of early feminism. Channing beautifully lets a lifetime of hurt seep through that brittle façade.
An “Apologia” is a formal defence of conduct or a position. If, as tables are turned, this absorbing, finely acted evening leaves a pronounced taste of standard-issue “progressive” seasoning in the mouth, there’s still plenty enough to chew on before that. As Rizzo almost sang: there are worse things you could do… with your time. Recommended.