Julian Clary and a recipe for disaster
SOME of you, hearing Julian Clary is in a play in the West End, might think: ‘ Ooh, that nice Julian, so funny and camp, let’s have a jolly night out.’ Don’t do it! Playwright Stephen Clark wrote Le Grand Mort for Mr Clary. Heaven knows why. First, the story is so muddled as to be artistically pointless.
Second, Mr Clary is not a good enough actor to appear in a tense psycho drama about two gay men on an early assignation, both of them possibly with murderous inclinations.
Mr Clary plays Michael, whom we find in his kitchen (a handsome set) as he prepares supper for a raunchy young visitor, Tim (James Nelson- Joyce).
Michael is middle-aged, nasal and camp, ie, Julian Clary. That at least saves Mr Clary having to act a lot. Even so, he trembles so much, I feared he would chop off a finger as he prepared a pasta dish and keeps looking at the audience, pleadingly.
Michael and Tim flirt and quarrel. Along the way we are told, in explicit terms, that Christ at Calvary is a sexual pin-up. Some creeps in the audience laughed at this. There is pretentious guff about Herodotus, Diana ( presumaby the princess) and Rasputin.
Rippling Mr Nelson- Joyce strips to his birthday suit and gives the audience a prolonged look at his whatnot.
The pasta smells good. The rest of the show stinks. Mr Clary, who is looking his age and is in danger of becoming as unfunny as Michael Barrymore, should either stick to panto or retire.
n THE feebleness of Le Grand Mort almost makes one grateful for the artistic ambition/pretension of the Young Vic’s
Wings, in which Juliet Stevenson spends most of the 75 minutes suspended from a trapeze. Miss Stevenson plays Mrs Stilson, a one-time aviatrix who has had a stroke and is suffering speech loss. In her confusion she imagines she is flying.
Two silk drapes are drawn across the traverse stage and have images of bi-plane flight projected on to them.
There is plenty of stagecraft in Natalie Abrahami’s production: a shifting stage and clever lighting to accentuate Mrs Stilson’s out-of-body sensations in hospital.
Our Juliet, such a grand old trooper (a damehood cannot be far off surely), shows plenty of stamina as she twirls and rotates. She deserves her applause at the end, if only for not succumbing to air sickness.
Yet American playwright Arthur Kopit has served up a tiresomely tricksy tale. Yes, we all get the idea that stroke victims can become frustrated, but the story-telling is repetitive and so cryptic that I found it impossible to develop any sympathy for Mrs Stilson.
‘What a strange adventure,’ she muses to herself at one point. It is a sentiment likely to be shared by audiences.
The one affecting scene is when Mrs S meets other patients with speech problems. I could have done with more of that human contact rather than the pseudish and glum stuff about the effects of a stroke.
One for Stevenson addicts and medical students only.