Theatre
Jack: A Night on the Town (Criterion) Pericles (National, Olivier)
Not a noble act
Sheridan Morley
Even on the dates when he does bother to show up and play the whole of it, Nicol Williamson's Barrymore solo Jack — a Night on the Town (Criterion) turns out to be not so much a night as a rather faltering evening. The idea itself was a great one: Williamson returning to a London theatre where he has been much missed these last 15 years, and in a stage biography of one of the other great Hamlet hell-raisers of the century.
The trouble, at least as it appeared on the first night, was that nobody had bothered to get anywhere much beyond the idea itself. Although Leslie Megahey is credited as director and (with Williamson) co-author, neither man seems to have done a lot more than trawl through the half- dozen Barrymore biographies for a few old Broadway and Hollywood anecdotes. They haven't even bothered to write an end to the show, so Williamson abruptly departs on the line, `that's all there is', giving us no indication of how, where, nor why Barry- more died, or whether this much matters to him or to us.
But it should. Even a cursory glance at Gene Fowler's Goodnight Sweet Prince, the best of the biogs, suggests that Barrymore is a classic American tragi-comedy of appalling manners, and one that deserves much better than this. The Hamlet of his generation was a tortured alcoholic, the starriest member of the 'royal family of Broadway' but also a man who could never forget being seduced at 14 by his stepmother, nor yet the mental-home incar- ceration of his actor father Maurice. It is a great story, one never yet properly told on stage or screen: merely to use it as a half- built vehicle in which Williamson can warm over his own old Hamlet is a chronic waste of both star and subject. Could nobody involved in this new Criterion management afford the services of a dramatist?
A revival of Pericles, the least satisfactory of all Shakespeare's plays and indeed the least Shakespearian since there is evidence that whole chunks of it are the work of oth- ers, usually means one of two things: Strat- ford is feeling guilty about having ignored it for a decade or two, or there is some direc- tor out there with a reputation to make.
The current revival is at the National, and its director, Phyllida Lloyd, is already reasonably established, so we will have to look elsewhere for the incentive behind this production. It is, I think, that Lloyd wished to see how far she could go, in partnership with a choreographer and a designer, towards taking our minds off the text and distracting us with a selection of rookery nook divertissements, just as though Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream had been rearranged by the Theatre de Com- plicite. Thus we get an actress on a pair of stilts giving us a carnival-king Antiochus, while the same actress (Kathryn Hunter, herself a Complicite veteran) later turns up in a 'I thought it was a Warhol, but it turned out to be a Sainsbury's forgery!' breathtaking parody of Barbara Windsor as the bawd of the brothel. References range from the Carry On movies all the way to Chinese Opera and Japanese Kabuki, but the most constant sight is that of a director desperately signalling across the stage to us that she hasn't the faintest idea what or who this play might be about, but that if we'll just stay in our seats she'll think up something else to divert our attention. Meanwhile, a large cast is left to flounder around the stage, grabbing what they can from the wreckage. The National is at present, on all its stages, dangerously inclined to give star billing to its directors rather than authors and actors: this Pericles is typically long on concept, short on actual delivery.
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