U.S. Steptoes? Stranger things have happened
Mad House (Ambassadors, London) Verdict: Crazy for Harbour and Pullman ★★★★✩ The Fellowship (Hampstead, London) Verdict: Sister thwacked ★★✩✩✩
FEW actors can fill stage like David Harbour, who is making his West End debut at the Ambassadors Theatre — and not just because he’s a 6 ft 3 in grizzly bear of a man.
Like a grizzly, the star of Netflix smash hit Stranger Things (and husband of pop star Lily Allen, who made her own West End debut last year in 2:22 A Ghost Story) may look deceptively warm and cuddly. But in front of an audience he can be dangerous and unpredictable, too.
What a combo he makes, therefore, with the no less mesmerising Hollywood actor Bill Pullman (Independence Day, While You Were Sleeping) in Theresa Rebeck’s new play Mad House. It’s the story of seriously dysfunctional siblings convening in Pennsylvania for the death of their wicked and manipulative father (Pullman).
Harbour plays the son, Michael, who’s caring for his terminally ill father while also recovering from a nervous breakdown that coincided with the death of his mother.
He and Pullman are like an American Steptoe and Son, bound together in the hell of a tumbledown clapboard house with peeling paint, filled with tatty family relics.
Wearing sneakers, pyjamabottoms and a washed-out T-shirt, melancholy Michael is an idealistic former oil company executive who taught himself to be docile, in order to get himself discharged from the state psychiatric facility. But that doesn’t stop his wheedling father trying to push him back over the edge.
Michael is a gentle giant, but he’s also lethally sarcastic. He can just about hold it together with his vexatious dad, but can’t help blowing his top at his glib banker brother, or his controlling lawyer sister, who rocks up to take over. He’s a glorious showman, too; impulsively drinking from a garden spray bottle and wearing a coat the wrong way round, like a DIY straitjacket.
Pullman’s sly and twisted father — with his snake eyes and provocative eyebrows — takes indecent pleasure in watching his boy writhe in mental agonies. Nor does he have any intention of going gently into his grave and, lugging an oxygen tank about the stage, demands cigarettes, booze and hookers.
Rebeck’s gloriously off-the-wall drama has soul in spades, and feeds her leading men with oneliners to relish. But in the supporting roles, her characterisation is patchy; and her muddled ending leaves us hanging.
Wealthy little brother Nedward (Stephen Wight) is written as little more than a sheepish yuppie. And sister Pam’s (Sinead Matthews) motivation for wanting Michael re-interred in the psychiatric hospital is under- explored. At least the nurse, Lillian (Akiya Henry), brings a touch of sanity — and some pain of her own.
But any lack of depth in Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s murky production won’t bother too many Harbour or Pullman fans. Here, they are a pair of theatrical pyrotechnicians who set Rebeck’s sometimes creaky play alight. n ANOTHER family drama, The Fellowship by Roy Williams, was blighted by losing its leading actor, Lucy Vandi, to ill-health a few days before it was due to open last week.
Cherrelle Skeete, who had been playing two minor roles, bravely stepped in, and is easily the best thing in a ropey drama about inter-generational conflict in a
black British family. Her character, Dawn, is a single mum whose eldest son was murdered in a racist attack, while her younger boy has taken up with one of the white girls she believes was part of the gang responsible.
Her barrister sister, meanwhile, has foolishly taken points on her driving licence for her white married MP lover.
And their mother, who came to the UK on the Windrush, is upstairs dying — but is almost completely ignored until she falls down dead with a bump upstairs.
WILLIAMS sed to write compelling dramas driven by sharp moral dilemmas; plays like Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads. Here we have only stereotypes, stuck in cliched situations and arguing in soundbites.
Blazing in Jamaican patois when she’s vexed and RP when she’s not, only Skeete stands out by letting rip with a character divided between her sectarian black politics and her all-white playlists on Alexa.
Paulette Randall’s astonishingly vague, two-hour-and-40-minute production lacks any sense of place; and sets the action inside what appears to be an Alexa console with spinning light disc above and below the stage.
Perhaps that corresponds to the play’s pop-psychology, but it does little to involve the audience in the two-dimensional saga.