Theatre Paul Bailey
THE GOAT, OR WHO IS SYLVIA? THE PHILANTHROPIST
Ian Rickson’s superb revival of Edward Albee’s The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, encourages its cast of four to be attentive to the tragicomic nuances the dramatist has put at their disposal. It is every bit as funny as its more famous predecessor, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as well as being considerably shorter, running at an hour and fifty minutes without an interval.
Rickson is aware that any audience witnessing this controversial study in unexpected marital discord must respond by laughing at, and with, the characters before coming to any judgement of them, be it harsh or forgiving, or even somewhere between the two.
The Goat is concerned with Martin, a successful architect based in New York, newly commissioned to design the World City, set to rise in the wheat fields of Kansas at an estimated cost of $27 billion, and his wife, Stevie. Martin has reached the age of fifty and is not too happy about it. He is worried, for a start, that he is already losing his memory over such trifling matters as the name of his best friend’s son or where he’s put the new head for his razor. Martin and Stevie are in the habit of sending themselves up by adopting upper-class English accents and pretending they’re acting in a Coward play. They seem to be perfectly matched.
Ross Tuttle, the best friend whose son’s name is Todd, arrives to interview Martin for a television series he presents called People Who Matter. Martin is too distracted to answer the straightforward questions Ross asks him and the recording is abandoned. The prurient Ross wonders aloud if Martin is cheating on Stevie, and eventually it is revealed, by way of a photograph Martin passes to him, that the object of the great architect’s affections is a goat. Ross is at first confused, then bewildered, and finally outraged.
Albee has given this late work in his long career the subtitle ‘Notes toward a definition of tragedy’, and, in the scenes that follow Martin’s embarrassed revelation, the brilliant comic banter about Sylvia, the beloved goat, becomes ever more frenetic as Stevie smashes to pieces all the ornaments in her reach. Their son, Billy, who loves his parents deeply and is struggling to accept the fact that he is gay, looks on aghast as pity and terror move into the New York equivalent of the House of Atreus. When language fails her, Stevie
howls. Martin, the constant pedant, corrects Stevie’s and Billy’s grammatical mistakes in the midst of his distress.
Sophie Okonedo gives the performance of her life as Stevie; Damian Lewis is the woebegone Martin, lost in hopeless love, to perfection; Archie Madekwe, making his debut on the London stage, is completely convincing as the teenaged Billy, while Jason Hughes, freed from the constraints of police work in the blissfully idiotic Midsomer Murders, captures the smutty-minded, moralistic Ross in all his smug awfulness. Rae Smith’s set and P J Harvey’s music add to the discomforting pleasures on offer. It has to be stressed that The Goat isn’t ‘about’ bestiality, just as Lolita isn’t ‘about’ paedophilia.
Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist (Trafalgar Studios) was written when he was in his twenties and under the spell of Molière. Its inspiration was The Misanthrope, in which the monstrous Alceste creates havoc by being dedicatedly critical of other people. Hampton’s idea was to turn that masterpiece on its head by substituting a do-gooder in Alceste’s place, a wellmeaning chap who never wishes to give offence to anyone. His philanthropist is called Philip, a philologist by profession, who is cocooned in the academic sub-world he occupies.
‘I haven’t even got the courage of my lack of convictions,’ he remarks, getting dangerously near to a state of selfawareness. Philip has to be liked, whatever the cost, which, it turns out, is considerable. He is an ass, but he shouldn’t be played as one, as he is here by Simon Bird.
Simon Callow, the director, has chosen young and inexperienced actors for this second revival of a stylish comedy of manners. All of them are ‘off the telly’ and it shows.
The most tiresome offender is Matt Berry as Braham, the novelist who has made a fortune with his gritty accounts of the plight of the urban poor. Berry plays him on a single, booming note, with little regard for Braham’s slippery characteristics, which Hampton takes malicious delight in exposing. He’s like a bad opera singer who has been abandoned by the orchestra. Simon Bird, by contrast, is virtually inaudible. Under Callow’s guidance, the actors indulge in an excess of mugging. Funny faces are in order. ‘Look,’ they seem to be hinting, ‘this is a comedy we’re playing.’ No, it bloody well isn’t, I wanted to shout back. It is an absolute farce, of the very worst kind.