My oh my! Jackie O’s cousins were wacky
Grey Gardens (Southwark Playhouse) Verdict: Niche appeal ★★✩✩✩
JACKIE Kennedy Onassis, that fashion doll of the 20th century, had two eccentric cousins who lived in cat-filled squalor on Long Island. The existence of Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter became a minor sensation in 1975 when a documentary was made about them.
The Beale women lived at Grey Gardens, a run-down pile in the Hamptons. Ten years ago a musical based on the 1975 documentary had success in New York. Gay men in particular loved the Beales’ scorn for convention.
Now the work is being given a London production at the Southwark Playhouse, a fringe venue winning a name for big musicals on a tight budget.
The show stars Sheila Hancock as old Edith and Jenna Russell as ‘Little’ Edie, a sometime beach babe. There are so many props to hand, the performers barely have room to swing their arms, let alone interpret a fussy but clever score.
By the Seventies, ‘Little’ Edie was middle-aged, trapped at Grey Gardens by her jealous mother. This forms most of the second half.
Miss Russell, American accent as elastic as chewing gum, plays things remorselessly for laughs. Wednesday’s audience, about 90 per cent male, enjoyed her caricatured gurning, but I ached for a subtler interpretation.
There were yelps of laughter when fans recognised moments f rom the documentary, but newcomers to the tale may find it less rewarding.
To see Miss Hancock is a pleasure, her mannerisms grandly actressy, her octogenarian glamour so bespoke. After the interval she sings a couple of songs with a charming frailty, but neither she nor Miss Russell is fully in character. One for the cognoscenti I fear.
JANET McTEER makes a husky mistress of sexual intrigue in the Donmar’s Liaisons Dangereuses, to be streamed live to venues around the country later this month. Sinfulness shimmers under candlelight. Dominic West’s amoral Valmont plots to deflower Elaine Cassidy’s Madame de Tourvel. Pity he hasn’t yet quite got his leg over his lines, but a delicious show.