No more sex, please, we’re bored
Don Juan in Soho Wyndham’s
Roll up, roll up to see David Tennant strutting his stuff in a posing pouch, scrawny chest and legs peeping from beneath a flapping dressing-gown. The West End surely affords no stranger sight this season than the former Time Lord, currently inducing ripples of pleasure in Broadchurch viewers as the super-intense DI Alec Hardy, gyrating away and baring almost all as the incorrigible Lothario, Don Juan.
I’m not going to beat about the bush. Patrick Marber’s updated version of Molière’s hoary 1665 comedy strikes me as pants. I didn’t see it when it was first staged a decade ago at the Donmar with bad-boy Welsh actor Rhys Ifans in the predatory title role. Ifans’s wild-eyed antics were celebrated as a tour de force. And the script was hailed by one critic, I kid you not, as “line by line... the best written of all Marber’s plays”– overlooking the fact that much of what aspires to make us laugh sounds like someone merely passing for a wit (“He’s Satan in a suit from Savile Row,” raves the sidekick chauffeur, Stan; “I’m the Gandhi of the gang bang, the Bishop Desmond Tutu of titillation,” agrees monied playboy “DJ”).
Perhaps in a small space, the slight action galloping apace, we would, like one of the anti-hero’s numerous conquests, be seized by a brief magnetic force of pure, dark, lifeaffirming amorality and then be released in time to head off to Old Compton Street in search of din-dins. But suffering the coitus interruptus of an interval and burdened with the props of hedonism (lots of dry ice and cavorting, scantily clad types in masks), the show feels like a prolonged awkward fumble. By the time a stalking statue of Charles II (don’t ask) carries the reprobate off in a flying rickshaw to face his doom, snatches of Mozart’s Don Giovanni heralding the approach of The Climax, you want to heave a sigh of relief.
It might sound odd to suggest that Tennant emerges with his dignity intact, but you’ve got to admire the cojones of an actor who manages to lend a certain gravitas as well as his customary twinkle to repellent, unreconstructed skirt-chasing attitudes. There’s almost no redeeming feature to this hot-limbed aristo with a cold-fish heart, except a pseudo-existentialist logic that suggests that anyone who thinks there’s more to life than transient pleasure is the real cad.
A grizzled Tennant, undeniably still a dish at 45, gamely submits to snogging Adrian Scarborough’s Stan, “doing tongues” with a prospective catch and then submitting to the latter’s mimed fellatio while he chats up the distressed fiancée of a man he has left in a coma – like some low-rent Richard III.
A red light from me, then, for this flaccid affair. For some, though, the temptation to ogle Tennant in the flesh will prove too great to resist.
Until June 10. Tickets: 0844 482 5138; delfontmackintosh.co.uk