Thank God for the critics. All failings can be laid at their door. Robert Lindsay appeared on a telly sofa last week to repudiate the shirtier reviews of Onassis. ‘It’s not a critic play,’ he said. And I wondered if ‘critic’ had changed grammatical species and become an adjective meaning ‘good’.
The show has its moments but the script is devoid of dramatic intelligence. Proper plays open with a dilemma that enlists the audience’s sympathies, unifies the action and creates suspense. Plenty of options were available to playwright Martin Sherman. Would Onassis succeed in replacing Maria Callas with Jackie Kennedy? Would he destroy his son Alexander’s romance with an ageing English divorcee? Would he conspire with the PLO to assassinate Bobby Kennedy? Rather than shaping the drama around one of these gripping plotlines Sherman lobs them all on stage any old how, kicks them around a bit and then boots them off one by one.
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