Theatre

Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunachs (Hampstead) Best of Times (Vaudeville)

Quartet of losers

Sheridan Morley

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,scene largely occupied by very big movie , stars in very small theatres sold out well before the first night, then I guess the stars ' 'might as well be our own. Sure enough, in .ithe wake of Juliette Binoche and Kevin 'Spacey and Nicole Kidman, we now get a 'fully-clothed Ewan McGregor (of Trainspotting and Shallow Grave and the imminent Star Wars prequel) making a remarkable London stage debut in David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle ainst the Eunachs. The good news for cGregor fans is that between now and hen the show closes in early January there are still tickets available for a couple of nights; the bad news is they will cost you £125 each, since the nights are charity fundraisers.

• Now, about the play. It is proudly noted in the programme that it first came, in 2,1966, from the old socialist-fringe Unity iTheatre to the West End and then Broad- way and finally the wide screen five years later. Indeed it did. But what the pro- 70 THE SPECTATOR 28 November 1998

gramme does not tell you is that it ran barely 22 performances in the West End, fewer than nine on Broadway, and that the film was taken off the screens after only five days despite the starring presence of John Hurt.

So we are not here dealing, as in most of the other recent star showcases, with some old and/or popular classic. We are dealing instead with one of the great flops of its period, and what is just wonderful about the current production is the way that it not only establishes McGregor in his Lon- don stage debut but also rehabilitates a play which virtually everyone had given up for lost.

There is another London debut here, that of McGregor's uncle Denis Lawson as director, and he has also employed his step-daughter Lou Gish in the only female role, so this is certainly a family affair, and it is a triumph of relative values.

Why then was Little Malcolm such a com- mercial disaster 30 years ago? It comes of the generation of Billy Liar and countless other plays about teenage angst and the disaffection of the young; unlike those oth- ers it is also a parody of the genre, and offers at least four other wonderful roles. What Lawson has established above all is that here is a play aching for rediscovery, and in theatres other than Hampstead there should now be several literary man- agers either kicking themselves or hanging their professional heads in shame at miss- ing this little gem.

Essentially it is a dark fable about four disaffected 1965 Huddersfield art students; when one of them (McGregor) gets expelled, he rallies the other three around him in a breakaway fascist group known as the Party of Dynamic Disaffection. McGre-

gor, as unable as Oblomov even to get him- self out of bed at the outset, has by the end of the evening become a chilling little Hitler, urging his pathetically dysfunctional band of renegades to put the boot into the only girl he might ever have been able to love.

Halliwell's genius (and, no, he is no rela- tion to the man who killed Joe Orton) is to contrast the grandeur of his students' ambi- tions for world (or at any rate Hudders- field) domination with the reality of their deep social inadequacy, but then nobody ever said Hitler was tall or good looking or a star turn at cocktail parties. True, this is a play that, like its central character, can never quite decide where it is going, or pre- cisely how it plans to get there, or even whether it might be worth going there at all. As a result, Little Malcolm is an almost perfect commentary on the student move- ments of the period despite sharing many of their fundamental views.

What makes Halliwell so worth the revis- it (and in 50 other stage and broadcast plays he has never had even a failure as famous as this) is his strange ability to satirise the lunacy of this quartet of losers while somehow also approving of their stand against bleak and bland authority. There have, since Malcolm, been many bet- ter student plays; but as this script shades from courtroom farce into murderous mad- ness, Halliwell has caught a moment in the postwar history of British college life which was as unintentionally funny as it was dan- gerous. Halfway from Kingsley Amis to Martin Amis, Little Malcolm is amazinglY alive and well worth another look; always assuming, of course, that you have £125 to spare on a ticket.

The two great composers of post-Sixties 'First, I put some odds and ends in storage, then some furniture, and finally, Edgar.' Broadway are unquestionably Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman, and it has always seemed to me sad that, in order to establish your loyalty to one, you had first to denigrate the other. True, they are poles apart; but, with Into the Woods (reviewed here last week) now playing at the Donmar Warehouse and the Herman anthology show Best of Times at the Vaudeville, Lon- don theatregoers have a rare chance to compare and contrast.

Ironically, although Sondheim has always been the deeper and darker of the two, it was Herman who was told a decade ago that he was imminently dying of Aids and who has only just discovered that, happily, he is back to full health. It is his songs, rather than Sondheim's, which have always been about the sheer joy of survival, and in this anthology we get 50 of these great staircase anthems from Hello, Dolly! through Mame to La Cage Aux Folles.

In the direct tradition of Irving Berlin, but I suspect the last of that line, Herman writes simple salutes to the everyday virtues of optimism: 'Open A New Win- dow', 'We Need A Little Christmas', 'I'm Still Here', Tut On Your Sunday Clothes', 'Before The Parade Passes By', 'I Promise You A Happy Ending', in song after song Herman reminds us that he is not the only one lucky to be alive, whereas Sondheim sometimes wonders whether life is really such a good idea. Sure the Vaudeville sets are remarkably tacky, and the choreography would have looked badly dated at the New York World's Fair of 1939; a cast which still badly needs Carol Channing or Angela Lansbury, stars of the kind even Herman does not make any more, is amiably led by Garth Bardsley who has the charm of a young Alfred Drake or Howard Keel, while Lindsay Hamilton is a genuine comic find. Of those who have joined the cast since its original Bridewell try-out last summer, both Sarah Payne and Kathryn Evans bring some much-needed old-style professional- ism to the big belt numbers. Hello, Jerry, nice to have you back where you belong.