Sharp wit and soppy endings – it’s the American way

Here’s something that continues to perplex me.

Here’s something that continues to perplex me. How is it that the best of American cinema and theatre is so often simultaneously sharp, sophisticated — and trite?

I’ve just been to see a tremendous new play at the Almeida in Islington, whose run ends this week. Becky Shaw has been a hit on Broadway and has enjoyed instant appeal in London too. It certainly appealed to me. Gina Gionfriddo has written a mordant, mostly cruel comedy of modern American manners, and the action and the repartee rattle along, intense, quickfire and merciless, with a brutality that leaves you breathless.

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This is not a theatre review, so suffice it to say that every one of the small cast is superb; and that it’s a story of family schism and family feeling, love, sex, money, marriage, dependency, psychosis and rejection.

Enough. For I come not quite to praise. What troubles me is exactly what troubled me at the end of a marvellous evening at the cinema last year, watching Up In The Air, a scintillating comedy starring George Clooney, for which one could offer almost the synopsis I’ve just given of Becky Shaw — with the addition of many airports, wheelie suitcases and excruciating video conferences. This too was observant, bitter, sceptical and stylish: sophisticated beyond measure. I can think of no mainstream British screenwriter or playwright since Congreve or Sheridan willing and able to be so unkind, unsparing, fast and funny. I emerged from the cinema last year, and the theatre last week, dazed by not only by the virtuosity but the intelligence: and the sneering, vulgar impertinence of it all. It made most British comedy seem laboured: lumbering, obvious and slow; sweet cider to their Fernet Branca; Fawlty Towers to their Curb Your Enthusiasm.