Fashionable Londoners go to the Donmar Warehouse to engage in shut-eye chic. It’s a weird way to relax. You buy a ticket to John Osborne’s 1964 classic, Inadmissable Evidence, and you sleep through most of its two and a half hours. All around me were seats full of happy dozers. How I envied them. Mind you, I felt bad for the cast because the snoozers were nodding and drooling in full view of the stage. Entertaining the unconscious isn’t what thesps go into showbiz for. Still, they’d read the script so they knew the scale of their enemy.
Osborne’s bright idea was to create a self-loathing misanthropist and to watch his world collapse around him. He made the central character a lawyer (named ‘Bill’, significantly) as an act of vengeance against the divorce specialists who had purloined large chunks of his fortune. So Bill is a solicitor in a crummy practice somewhere off Fleet Street. Oddly enough, he tells us, ‘the law is there to be exploited just like it exploits us’. Er, hang on. I’m lost already. Solicitors feeling exploited by the law? That’s as likely as astronauts feeling exploited by space travel.
Anyway, the law isn’t Osborne’s main target here. It’s sex. And in particular the terrible things sex does to poor old men. Bill can’t stand women. But he needs them, too, so he’s always chasing skirt. And although he’s a fat, sour, bald, whiney, humourless, middle-aged misery-guts, he’s also a sex champion. He’s got four women on the go. His long-suffering wife, two gorgeous secretaries and a sophisticated 40-year-old beauty who loves him unconditionally and finds it amusing that he plays around in the typing pool. I mean honestly. It’s impossible to believe a single syllable of this vain, empty, shapeless, diseased, hectoring twaddle. To be fair, Osborne does add a joke. Just the one, though. It’s about a posh girl ‘donating her virginity to Oxfam’. If he’d penned a couple of hundred more like that he might have written a half-decent play.
Douglas Hodge, usually so dependable and lovable, can’t find a consistent tone for Bill. He tries to give him the full Alf Garnett hysterics. (Or perhaps he was just trying to wake up row B.) Then he attempts a richer and more considered Shakespearean meltdown. That’s hopeless, too. He briefly enters the zany wonderland of the Spike Milligan sketch and withdraws, defeated. Nothing works.
In Act Two, the play goes from boring to baffling. The cast of eight have to perform about 12 roles but the duplications aren’t indicated in the programme. It’s impossible to know what’s going on. Of all the play-scripts I’ve seen on stage (rough total, 1,000), this is among the three or four worst. If you really want to know how bad it is, imagine rewatching those clips of Gaddafi’s lynching. Remember what that felt like? This will make you sicker.
Better stuff at the Royal Court. Jumpy, by April De Angelis, is a rich, bustling family comedy about middle-class parents groping their way towards the big five-oh while their teenage kids start groping each other. The play’s essential seriousness is beautifully leavened by snatches of out-and-out farce. This is a tricky cocktail to mix properly and, although not everything works, the bulk of the show is perfectly convincing.
Doon Mackichan, as an ageing cougar, steals the first act with a weirdly inappropriate striptease routine which manages to be hilarious, slightly icky, rather tragic and quite sexy all at once. I wasn’t even sure why her character did it. But never mind. Tamsin Greig, as a hassled mum trying to connect with her narky young daughter, gives another of her deeply felt and painfully funny accounts of womanhood in crisis. Greig’s great skill is to convey lightness and darkness, weight and fluffiness, in the same instance. Both registers come across with absolute clarity, each unimpeded by the other.
Although De Angelis writes very acutely for women, her teenagers are more schematically drawn: burning bundles of anger, confusion and grunting. Her men aren’t particularly well rounded either. Like the females in Osborne’s play, the chaps here seem to pop up exactly when they’re needed by the opposite sex. Richard Lintern does a quietly brilliant turn as Roland, a handsome ageing actor. ‘I’ve been horribly busy,’ he confesses at one point. An innocuous line but it got a big laugh because it captures the aggressive boastfulness of success. And he characterises one of the more familiar agonies of parenthood as follows: ‘Our children like their friends more than us. And we like them more than we like our friends.’
This is the best show of the autumn season so far. And it’s targeted at parents rather than teens, perhaps. But your teens won’t complain if you drag them along.
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