Imelda’s busybody is the best of Bennett
Playing Sandwiches/Lady Of Letters (Bridge Theatre, London) Verdict: Imelda nails it ★★III ★★★★I An Evening With An Immigrant (Bridge Theatre) Verdict: Charm offensive ★★★II Pippin (Eagle Garden Theatre, Vauxhall) Verdict: Hippy dippy psychedelia ★★★II
THERE has been something missing from Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues, which continue to file into the Bridge Theatre like Noah’s Ark, two by two.
For some reason the actors — even such greats as Kristin Scott Thomas and Lesley Manville — haven’t quite nailed Uncle Alan. This week, Imelda Staunton changed all that.
Where others have played on Bennett’s scathing wit, Yorkshire snobbery or camp frivolity, Staunton knows how to just have fun with Bennett’s writing.
She is less eager to condemn her character’s foibles and more inclined to enjoy them. This makes her performance much lighter, less satirical — and more amusing.
Naturally, it helps that A Lady Of Letters is one of Bennett’s best yarns. Staunton cunningly draws you into the story of a superior spinster who fires off letters of complaint about all forms of errant behaviour. She fumes over hearse drivers smoking at the crematorium . . . dog dirt outside Buckingham Palace . . . a young couple with a child across the road.
Mouth set like a halfslice of lemon, Staunton, clad in a cardie and blouse, tuttuts beneath her grey perm as she surveys the council estate beyond her net curtains.
Comfort allows for a firm armchair, ir, decoration allows for a lacy y tablecloth. But Staunton finds s unexpected joyfulness in the play’s s comic twist — I won’t spoil it for r you — which serves as a kind d of redemption.
I was less taken by Lucian n Msamati in the curtainraiser, Playing Sandwiches, about a paedophile park worker trying to mend his ways.
Msamati is a picture of innocence, sweeping up crisp packets and drinking tea from a flask. But he is too expansive an actor for Bennett’s knottier, slyer ways, and this isn’t a part I’d wish on anyone.
The point may be to make us consider the scars that at paedophiles carry, but that at requires a longer play with more psychological detail.
AN EVENING With An Immigrant ( also running at the Bridge, though not as part of the Talking Heads Live season) should really be called Inua Ellams’s Charm Offensive.
The Nigerianborn poet is best known for his National Theatre plays: Barber Shop Chronicles and his adaptation of Chekhov’s Russian classic Three Sisters, reimagined during Nigeria’s Biafran war of the late 1960s.
As a storyteller, Ellams is irresistible. And, man, does he have a story to tell. His Catholic mother and Muslim father were run out of Nigeria in the 1990s by gunmen who murdered the family’s security guard. He grew up in poverty in Peckham, but used the small blue pens from Argos to pursue his career as a poet.
Ellams is enormously at ease alone on stage, supported by nothing more than a stool and a suitcase. He chuckles over his good fortune and misfortune, while welling up at certain mo moments. He also recites bi bits t of his hiphopi infn flu en c ed poetry, the imagery and rhythms of whi which passed me by. I found the warmth and the good sen sense of his storytelling muc much more valuable.
MEANWHILE, at vau vauxhall’s tiny Eagle gar garden Theatre, they are ret returning Stephen Schw Schwartz’s 1972 Broadway musi musical Pippin to its roots, when it began life as a smallscale student revue.
Our titular prince ( Ryan Anderson), eldest son of the medieval emperor Charlemagne, is portrayed as a peaceloving Californian hippy searching for the meaning of life, while ignoring sirens on the adjacent A202 Kennington Lane.
The best number, No Time At All, is sung by Pippin’s grandma, who urges him to live a little.
The choreography is mostly improvised airstroking, as there isn’t enough room for Bob Fosse’s raunchy moves which made the original production such a hit.