Theatre

Me and Mamie O'Rourke (Strand) Macbeth (Barbican) Piaf (Piccadilly)

Feeble thane

Sheridan Morley

Adrian Noble's admirable RSC policy of bringing the big stars back to Shake- speare (this year alone has seen the Branagh Hamlet, the Robert Stephens Lear and the Alec McCowen Prospero) now goes somewhat adrift with his Derek Jacobi Macbeth at the Barbican. The pro- duction itself has a kind of brisk, crisp effi- ciency, but the central casting presents an insuperable problem. Jacobi is simply not a warrior King of Scotland: our greatest poetic actor since Gielgud has real trouble, as did Sir John, with the physicality of the role, and by the final duel seems to have grown suicidal enough to fall on Macduff's sword. The alternative might have been for them to go off together and run a really good country-house hotel, leaving Malcolm in charge of the nation, for this is the most gentle of productions, unless you count the 'I've invented the Toll.' battering of Macduff's baby's head in a rare moment of horror.

Noble has the witches view the action from a stage lift, while Jacobi, the most noble and reluctant of hell-hounds, keeps his careful distance from Cheryl Campbell, an Imelda Marcos of a Lady Macbeth in a series of designer gowns. There seems a certain vagueness about when and precisely where this Macbeth is all happening, and wherever it is you feel that the central fig- ure would rather be someplace else. Every- one here keeps their distance, and there is never the sense of the danger or mystery or sex without which Macbeth as a play, or as a man, cannot truly function.

The supporting cast is never less than adequate, but never a lot more than that either: we have mysteriously been trans- ported back not to 11th-century Scotland but the 1956 Old Vic.

It is perhaps debatable whether the director, Peter Hall, should engineer a nightly standing ovation for Elaine Paige as

Piaf (Piccadilly) by having the supporting cast stand around to applaud her as she

makes her final entrance. What is beyond debate is, however, that this is one of the great star-turns of the year, if not the decade. Hall and Paige have taken Pam Gems's fragile, 15-year-old scrapbook of a play and turned it into a breathtaking musi- cal triumph by the simple device of focus- ing on the songs rather than the dialogue.

The original Howard Davies production, an admirable RSC company effort led by Jane Lapotaire, was inevitably limited by the fact that its star was an actress and not a great solo singer. Paige, by simply steep- ing herself in the old Piaf recordings and then redelivering them with stunning accu- racy and power, achieves a dramatic con- cert interrupted by fragments of biography.

But this was never a great play. Gems chose to tell the story of the little sparrow as a series of blackout sketches in minimal detail. Her Piaf is constantly in the ring, slugging it out against friends and man- agers and lovers, all of whom come to bear a remarkable resemblance to each other since they are none of them adequately delineated. This must indeed be the only one-woman show with a complete cast of other male and female characters, in none of whom are we asked to take any but the most fleeting interest.

But when she sings, Piaf soars. As she tells her friend Josephine Baker, 'they couldn't print enough money for the way we feel', and those of us lucky enough to have seen her in person at Olympia in Paris have always felt the same: no regrets.

Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders have achieved considerable local television success as a double-act, but they have yet to make it in the straight theatre, and they are certainly not helped towards that goal

by Me and Mamie O'Rourke, a dire Ameri- can comedy at the Strand which looks like nothing so much as an overwrought pilot for a Californian TV series which merciful-

ly never got made.

Written by Mary Agnes Donoghue, who since the movie, Beaches, has been special- ising in middle-aged female bonding screenplays, this one concerns two bud- dies, one unaccountably married to a kind of anti-architect who persists in demolish- ing rather than building their Los Angeles hillside home. Saunders plays this role with a kind of wan charm, while French bustles around as her overweight pal; both appear to have drifted onto the set from one of those daytime television chat shows where the dysfunctional expose themselves to the prurient. Not a happy sight.