Theatre
Shakespeare for My Father (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) Scrooge (Dominion) What the Heart Feels (Orange Tree, Richmond)
In the shadows
Sheridan Morley
In my theatre-going life, I have been lucky enough to see some truly classic solo shows: John Gielgud's Ages of Man, Emlyn Williams as Dickens, Roy Dotrice as John Aubrey, Michael MacLiammoir as Oscar Wilde. But none has moved me as much, nor left me with so much to think about, as Shakespeare for My Father which I first saw on Broadway three summers ago and has now happily arrived at the Theatre Royal.
This is a breathtaking monologue which mixes classical theatre, backstage anec- dotes and personal therapy of a kind only available to a founding member of Olivier's National Theatre who has spent the last 20 years in California.
The actress in question is, of course, Lynn Redgrave, youngest of Sir Michael's three children and the one who has always been the most talented, amiable and intelli- gent of them. Born in the Blitz, named for Lynn Fontanne who offered to adopt her brother and sister during the war, Lynn grew up as the forgotten daughter, the only one of his children whose birth does not even feature in her father's daily diary, while both Vanessa and Corin, by contrast, had theirs announced from the stage.
In a wondrously touching, heartbreaking- ly honest account of her growing up as the runt of the litter, Lynn is still careful not to give too much sisterly offence; she scarcely mentions her father's bisexuality, and only very occasionally lets the showbiz mask slip far enough for us to see how impossible it must have been to have a brother and sister whose political extremism and narrow- minded intolerance have at times brought her close to changing her name in a dis- tancing attempt at personal and profession- al self-protection. Lynn is the only one of the surviving Redgraves still to understand the virtues of subtlety and humour and understatement; she is also the only one with the courage to dig right back into her Australian roots in an effort to discover just what it is that has kept five generations of her family in such a desperate quest for the limelight. ■ Those of us who are also actors' children and grandchildren know this landscape all too well: Lynn inhabits the dark shadows that lie between dressing-room and foot- lights, illuminated by a curious half-light in which the only trustworthy reflections are those in the dressing-room mirrors where we are forever seeking our fathers and grandfathers through a making-up glass darkly.
She plays her travelling show out amid minimal props but beneath a suitably and symbolically shadowy photograph of Sir Michael, the greatest Stratford leading man of the early 1950s; Cordelia to his vanished and vanquished Lear, Ophelia to his Ham- let, Cleopatra to his Antony, she sets out to define her own identity and survival from the unsafe harbour of a father who only at the very last, ravaged and dying of Parkin- son's disease in a hospital where he was convinced the curtains separated him not from the patients but from an entire audi- ence, could bring himself to take her to his now only faintly beating heart.
Along the way, Lynn does some savagely funny parodies of her co-stars from Edith Evans and Maggie Smith to Noel Coward and Olivier himself, never forgetting Larry's appalling cruelty to his old rival when Michael started his terrible last ill- ness. Her show is raw with pain and radiant with discovery: the integrity with which she confronts her father's ghost on his own classical territory is the most impressive sight on any London stage. For the radi- ance and the regret with which she tells her remarkable story, Lynn Redgrave richly deserves to sweep the board at all the forthcoming stage awards; after far too long abroad, she has come home with a vengeance.
Christmas theatrical treats for all the family are oddly thin on the ground this year, which is why Scrooge might just stag- ger through the festive season. Not that it deserves to: this ghastly staging of the ten- year-old Albert Finney movie still has a Leslie Bricusse score of such stunning banality that it is hard to remember the time, all of 30 years ago, when he and Antony Newley (who now stars in this tired pantomime) were writing some of the best new musicals along Shaftesbury Avenue.
Appallingly undercast, disgracefully directed and pathetically sung and danced, Scrooge only comes to life at the end of an eternal couple of hours when Newley final- ly galvanises himself into some sort of dra- matic and vocal action, as if suddenly determined to revive this corpse of a show on its way to the undertaker's.
Much better news at the Orange Tree in Richmond, however, where Stephen Bill's What the Heart Feels is that blessed rarity, a play about the way we live now. Outside David Hare, it is hard to find any dramatist with a real grip on the Eighties and Nineties but Bill, who writes like an Ayck- bourn with a sharper social and political conscience, is willing to take on the seismic shifts of domestic and civic life over the last decade. Sam Walters brilliantly directs a large cast in which Paul Shelley and Chris Matthews are outstanding.
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