Theatre Paul Bailey
She Loves Me, the enchanting musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick which is at the Menier Chocolate Factory until early March, was first performed on Broadway in 1963, the year the Beatles recorded ‘She Loves You’. Any similarity between the two begins and ends there. Bock and his lyricist based their show on a play by the Hungarian Miklos Laszlo, a master of romantic comedies, called Illatszertar, or Parfumerie. This same piece inspired the film The Shop Around the Corner, directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch, starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in the roles taken at the Menier by Mark Umbers and Scarlett Strallen. Georg and Amalia work in Mr Maraczek’s perfumery in Budapest and they can’t bear one another. Georg is boorish in Amalia’s clever and stylish presence and is constantly trying to belittle her.
It’s the story of Beatrice and Benedick updated to the 1930s, but with a twist. Each of them has responded to a lonely hearts ad in a newspaper, and Amalia is convinced that she has at last found her perfect soulmate. She informs her lovelorn correspondent that she will be in the Café Imperiale, which is noted for its ‘romantic atmosphere’, where she will be sitting alone reading War and Peace.
This is joyously silly stuff, with the occasional dark undertone to remind the audience that Europe was not an entirely happy place between the wars. There’s an unpleasant subplot, involving another member of the staff, which makes Mr Maraczek seriously upset. Maraczek is played by Les Dennis, last seen as ex-burglar Michael in Coronation Street, asking for punishment by marrying Gail and challenging Weatherfield’s current murderer-in-residence to polish him off. That ambition achieved, Dennis is once again free to display his skills as a good old trouper.
Katherine Kingsley as the constantly cheated-on Ilona gets a deserved ovation for ‘A Trip To The Library’, the wittiest number in an evening of witty numbers. Scarlett Strallen and Mark Umbers are perfectly mismatched and matched as the argumentative sweethearts and Dominic Tighe is a convincing cad. Paul Farnsworth’s sets have a lovely chocolatebox authenticity, and the affection the director Matthew White feels for the show is evident throughout.
I am a keen admirer of the work Josie Rourke has done since she took over as artistic director at the Donmar Warehouse, but her production of Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan is a disappointment. Joan is the only person on stage to wear what is known as a ‘period costume’. Everyone else is dressed in modern clothes. There is an obvious reason. Joan is an eternal presence, unlike the Catholics who ordered her burning at the stake for witchcraft. Her persecutors and opponents are the religious bigots, the time-serving politicians and financiers who are responsible for the mess we are in right now.
At the Donmar, the latest news from the Stock Exchange and Wall Street is flashed on a giant screen at the back of the acting area. Evan Davis, from BBC’S Newsnight, comments on the developments. This simplistic approach insults a dramatist as bracingly impartial as Shaw, who gives his characters the time and space in which to ennoble or demean themselves. This revival only bursts into life when the actors are allowed to speak the words Shaw wrote for them, with no distractions.
Joan wasn’t canonised until 1920, three years before Saint Joan was written. Shaw was a feminist from the very start of his long writing life and Joan belongs with Eliza and Major Barbara as an example of a free-thinking spirit. As Joan, Gemma Arterton is sweetly reasonable and stubborn by turns, and Fisayo Akinade is the funniest and campest Dauphin imaginable. They provide the only reason for witnessing what has to be accounted a cock-up.
Yasmina Reza’s Art, in Christopher Hampton’s deft translation, has been revived at the Old Vic in a very good production by Matthew Warchus. The author was apparently horrified when her three-hander won a Best Comedy award when it was first produced. She was under the impression the piece was closer to tragedy. The easy jokes about contemporary painting with which it begins are soon replaced by something more rewardingly subtle. It’s really a study of certain types of masculinity, of the roles men assume to protect themselves in the everyday world. Paul Ritter as Marc, the critic with fixed opinions, Rufus Sewell as Serge, who swims with every fashionable tide, and Tim Key as Yvan, the unintentionally hilarious screaming psychotic mess, are superb. Art is a tragic comedy or a comic tragedy, depending on your point of view.