Six Degrees of Separation
Old Vic, until 3 April
The Little Dog Laughed
Garrick, booking to 10 April
Even those who’ve never entered a theatre know the title. John Guare’s 1990 play, Six Degrees of Separation, tells of a penniless black hustler, Paul, who inveigles his way into New York’s upper-class society by claiming to be the son of Sidney Poitier. The couple he bamboozles are art dealers. Wily, avaricious and insecure, they work without a gallery and instead operate in the shadows of parties and restaurants, like illicit bookies, speculating in works which they own briefly and then ‘flip’ to the next greedy broker or syndicate. Dealing invisibly makes them attractive to clients who are anxious to conceal their wealth from respectable muggers like the revenue or the ex-wife.
Guare’s many-layered script is full of astute cultural observations. That the art market is a fruit machine for rich philistines is hardly a new idea but it’s still worth dramatising. By giving his Manhattan yuppies no professional location, no fixed abode, he slyly hints at an equivalence between them and the con artist who arrives at their door one evening. They take him in. And he takes them in. Each character here is a nomadic drifter surviving on his charm, brains and daring. So this is a symbol of the American dream. It’s also a lamentation on the emptiness of ambition. The rich couple recognise how vacuous their gilded lives are and yet by the play’s end they have achieved a kind of validation thanks to the envy of the ambitious tramp who’s desperate to emulate them.
The script works like a prism with mirror-like surfaces. Commentators think they’re interpreting it when they’re merely reciting their own prejudices.
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