Theatre
Thursday's Ladies (Apollo) The Importance of Being Earnest (Royalty)
All girls together
Christopher Edwards
This generously cast West End produc- tion offers an early piece by Loleh Bellon, the French actress turned playwright. The main parts of Sonia, Marie and Helene are taken by Dorothy Tutin, Eileen Atkins and, Sian Philips — as attractive and varied a cast as you could reasonably ask for. Three 60-year-old lifelong friends gather, one Thursday in 1975, for tea. They have been doing this most Thursdays for years to debate the present, the past and, in- creasingly, the prospect of the grave. It is a slight piece — artful, Gallic, charming with all .the ingredients, in fact, that you might expect from a French actress of sensibility. There is, however, a toughness about it too. Or, if that seems too extrava- gant a term, an unexpected and quite cunning ordering of the experiences of these three women. Jokes about the family tomb fit into the scheme of things — as do most of the women's other preoccupations. The playwright knows what she is doing with her ladies.
Yet she takes just a little too long to start doing it. The play begins with a longueur — a period of flat sketchiness as the threesome meet for one of their weekly teas. The characters, it is true, acquire their features quickly enough — that, you might think, is the least a former actress could do for her cast. But so little seems to be happening and our patience is taxed. Sonia, a spendthrift Russian emigree, is scatterbrained but open to life. She has had fun, which is more than can be said for Helene. Helene is rich, but has kept life at a frustratingly prudent distance. Finally there is Marie — a woman who had a career, is wiser than the other two, but who was widowed 15 years ago. As they speak about themselves time dissolves, seamless- ly, into the past and they re-enact girlish rituals and rivalries which they have repro- duced in later life. The acting in these early sessions — teasing squawks and gawky girlishness — can be a little flesh-creeping. Just about the only actor I have seen handle this sort of regression to childhood be- haviour with complete conviction is Derek Jacobi in Breaking the Code. But, as the evening progresses, and the girls grow up, we find common emotional themes linking up the past, present and future. Helene had a brother, Jean, to whom she was possessively devoted. Sonia flirted with him, but it was Marie who married him. Their different responses to him and to his early death serve to define the three characters. And this, along with Sonia's blind devotion to her fainéant son, just about make up the bare essentials of the play.
So, there is little enough going on, but what we have, unravelled before us, are three individual lives made touchingly coherent. The pleasure lies in the gradual, delicate, overlapping of incident and con- versation through which this prickly, frank and very female friendship takes shape. It is a slight piece, and I can understand certain friends who left, irritated, after half an hour. Thirty minutes, they felt, out of one and a quarter hours (without interval) should be more than enough time for a play to show its qualities. But those qual- ities are there, even if you have to wait around a bit for them to exercise their charms.
'In its own strictly limited way a perfectly competent work.' This was Evelyn Waugh's rather begrudging appraisal of Oscar Wilde's great comedy. Limited? Well, yes, the plot and characterisation are thin and artificial, but like everything else in the work, they are only there to show off Wilde's wit. You leave this revival, directed by Donald Sinden, realising once again how clever, how very clever Oscar Wilde could be at his best.
So many of the famous lines that one knows only individually are — extrava- gantly it seems — locked into one another in the same play. And this talented cast succeeds in making all the well-known witticisms sound freshly minted. The hardest task, perhaps, falls to Dame Wen- dy Hiller playing Lady Bracknell — I think nobody, on stage or in the theatre, really relaxes until the 'handbag' line is over. This fine actress succeeds, by subtle and unexpected inflections, in making the gor- gon role her own, formidably funny crea- tion. The rest of the cast are also very polished — from Gabrielle Drake's poised and pretty Gwendolen down to Ken Wyn- ne's cameo as the tormented Lane, Alger- non's long-suffering butler. There are two slight reservations: Denis Lawson's Algie does not always seem a natural inhabitant in this world of artifice — his hoarse voice and too too affected vowels verge on parody. And the sets, for all their grand- ness, lack a clear sense of location when the action shifts from town to country. But this production amused us enormously, and is warmly recommended.
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