Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Theatre Royal Haymarket
Inherit the Wind
Old Vic
‘What do you want?’ a film producer asks Holly Golightly about half an hour into Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but if I find out I’ll tell you first.’ At this point my hopes for the evening collapsed. Rule one of the characterisation manual states that a character who wants nothing, or nothing much, isn’t a dramatic personality but a list of utterances enfolding an emptiness.
In this adaptation of Truman Capote’s wartime novella, Holly comes across as a camp fantasy, a popsicle of pretentious egoism floating around New York being adored by wealthy fools, fantasising about stealing diamonds and delivering the sort of polished inanities only fictional characters speak. There’s a romance buried somewhere in the script but it’s badly botched. Three potential lovers present themselves, a frosty Brazilian, a fat rich Nazi and a penniless, spineless writer.
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