The first half of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (Haymarket, 27 July)

(Update: my homeboy Michael Billington was, I assume, tripping balls on press night.)

This is probably the first time I've walked out at the theater. So, in the interests of objectivity: this is a review of the first half of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." For all I know the second half would have made me rethink everything I know about performance and being human. But know that I once sat through the entirety of "Lord of the Dance: Dangerous Games."

But, my god, that first half. This version of the story, based on Truman Capote's original story rather than the deathless hot mess of a film, establishes itself as something like a dream play: the narrator reminisces about Holly Golightly, a woman of elegance and dubious morals who lived in his building in a pre-Sex and the City New York, blah blah you know the deal. But at the center of this dream is Pixie Lott, who bravely decides to play the part as a human Fleshlight who can't sing. Lott does everything in her power to strip any doubleness out of the script's many entendres; I fear she may have been trying for Marilyn, but came out closer to Gina Gershon in "Bride of Chucky," less any self-awareness or humor or fun. At one point in the production a trained cat is brought on to walk across the stage; in comparison you really appreciate the cat's calm professionalism. The story's setup also lets Holly sing a few songs--it's a £65 seat, I guess--and there, too, Pixie faltered: I lost my ability to follow the lyrics of one countryfied song, for example, as the cumulative effect of singing, maintaining an accent, and standing upright pretty much defeated her. And the ENTIRE POINT OF THE PLAY is that thingummy, the male lead, is reminiscing about this magical creature he doesn't entirely understand. Pixie's Golightly is about as mysterious as stud farming, and nearly as melodic.

It's not that anyone else is any good, either--but how can you blame actors acting opposite a central garbage fire of a part? Pixie's friend from Arkansas--no force on earth could make me look up her name from a website--had if anything a less recognizably human accent; for whole stretches I gave up trying to figure out what they were saying, and as a functionally monolingual English speaker listening to dialogue in English that's a bit of a thing. 

There were other smaller garbage fires almost obscured by the central one. The production subtly tells us the Captoe-surrogate is gay by, at one point, putting a sailor onstage behind him; as though uncertain that this would be missed, that sailor spends some time with another male sailor friend. An older man has already told Capote to join him in the restroom. It's all just this side of a sandwich-board saying I ENJOY SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH MEN. Next to the lead performance, this seemed like Ibsen. 

(The Japanese photographer, for devotees of the film, spoke English with no accent whatsoever.)

I fear I'm making this all sound more interesting than it was. Like the cat, though, the performances were all coached to within an inch of their lives; what energy there was seemed to be from the people in front of me, who were (justifiably) angry at how awful this was. 

Paradise Lost (Wilton's Music Hall, 19 June)

Five minutes into this, and I was about ready to give up on it. Manchild walks out; manchild tells a lame joke; manchild does a stupid thing with a rope. Some music plays. Christ almighty: seventy-five minutes of this. But the opening twee hipster bullshit is, fortunately, being staged for our benefit. By the end I was totally sold: on the seriousness with which it took the story of Paradise Lost; on the way that it adapted it to the context of a modern relationship, and modern child-having; and finally on the few moments when it directed our imaginations to contemplate Miltonic battle scenes, somehow through one guy standing in the middle of a stage. The initial awkwardness, the cutesy-poo hipsterdom, was a way of bringing us into the production; of disarming us, and also of seeing god's creation of the world--and a parent's creation of a child--as acts of sweaty, awkward, not-sure-this-will-work improvisation. 

I don't think I've ever thought of Milton's god as hurt before: as awkward in creation as a parent with their children, and as devasted as a spouse at the end of a relationship. So this retelling of that story made me take Milton seriously in a way I never had. Similarly, I don't think I've ever seen the terror of being a parent conveyed so effectively; no kids m'self, and I was terrified of losing them. And I felt that opening--that opening I hated--coming back to me relentlessly: that god-the-father and an actual father both work through awkwardly willing something into being, terrified that whatever they imagine watching them will stop it, or not care, or find it stupid. A relentlessly smart script, with some repeated phrases making comparisons between unlike contexts drawn together in brain-explodey ways. Some of the most effective stage effects I've seen in a while; but that introduction opens them up to us, again, as effects willed into being by someone who isn't sure they're going to work. 

They totally did.

House of Burlesque: Straight Up (London Wonderground, 7 July)

Nothing is less erotic than enforced eroticism. (Other than Michael Gove.)

This was a comped ticket, and a longstanding point of curiosity: I'd never been to a burlesque show, but it was the sort of thing that (say) a Rock Hudson character would have taken Doris Day to, while pretending to be an Arkansan neurosurgeon in 1962. And I'm a demon for anything Rock'd do. It's not exactly that burlesque is having its moment--that was surely a while ago, what with the film with Cher or whatever--but that moment seemed to be continuing. I thought, hey, it'd mix sophistication with toplessness. I could deal. In the end, though, this was pretty amateurish. In the manner of a Hooters, this was the sort of spectacle in which the presence of breasts would mitigate a range of mediocrities. I had hoped for sophisticated fun; I got amateur archery and bits waggled in my face. Just next door, at the NT earlier this year, I saw someone get a penis grafted onto their body--against their seeming volition--after an evening of choreographed torture. I hardly know what to do, frankly, with someone waggling about in pasties while Adele plays. 

Cut (Vaults Theatre, 5 July)

I'm getting tired

of plays

Where the dialogue is 

Clearly

Written in little "dramatic"

Bursts 

to

signify

The anomie of modern life or whatever but in practice just sort of 

make the actor

talk spastically

for seventy minutes.

Is there anything in culture less interesting than the idea of the serial killer?

This was a lot of foofaw for the payout that--surprise--someone is, yeah, a serial killer. The foofaw included immersions in total darkness--indeed part of the foofaw was even finding this theater, located (as the name suggests) in a vault under Waterloo Station. There were also points where the lone actor sort of scooooched rolls of cling film back and forth across the performance space, for what felt like quite a while. (You'd be surprised how quickly the sound of cling film becomes monotonous.) This, along with the enclosed space and the darkness, might well have lead to some intense performance effects. But, again, in the end, we're left the problem of this all becoming about a serial killer--like unwrapping a present to find a pair of socks, or just more wrapping paper. What was required to engineer this performance--the actor receiving directions in the dark via earpiece, the work required in setting all of this up in a weird location--was more interesting than most of which happened in the show.

The Truth (Wyndham's Theatre, 31 June)

Whenever your culture-vulture friends say withering things about West End shows, they mean middling stuff like this. I can't remember anyone's name, so I'll just call them by random French ones: Guilliame is having an affair with Fifi, who is married to Tabernacle; but Tabernacle--zut alors--has been laid off, and is Guilliame's best friend. And what of Clothilde, Guilliame's wife? You'll never guess. There was even wan accordian music between the acts, lest we forget that this was taking place in France, a country where (in the English imaginary) affairs are entered into with all the zest of Netflix selections. This wasn't even particularly funny, I think in part because no-one on stage acted convincingly human. I missed The Father last year, but judging from this, Florian Zeller is definitely the new Yasmina Reza: someone whose not-fantastic plays, owing to a certain basic shallowness, do well in translation. And in this global middlebrow, we know it's France because there's adultery and French names; otherwise, this could have been set anywhere in the world, to no particular advantage. 

I mean, let's take a moment to look at that being laid off thing: does that mark this as a subtle inquiry into marital mores under neoliberalism? I guess. And the firm that hires Tabernacle late in the play is Swedish, so we have some point about the contemporary EU and transnationalism. And, then, maybe that's the point: that life under neoliberalism is so crushingly boring that--I dunno? We need shitty light farce? Or, maybe, that we're doomed to it?

So rote and uninspired as to be nearly avant-garde--I'm still half afraid that I missed the subtle point that would indicate this airless hetero farce, which could have been written at any point since about 1905, was in fact some terribly up-to-date inquiry into gender roles. But no: no-one is gay or trans, or even interesting; and the translation seemed only about 95% idiomatic. If someone had told me this script had been generated by computers, I would have been fascinated: they really can do such an amazing job synthesizing genres these days. And the performers did the whole farce-by-numbers thing, acting exactly as you would expect them to; full points there, even as I would assume robots might hit their lines with slightly more accuracy. 

If anyone had ideas here, it was the set designers, from whom I got exactly one idea: that high-end hotels and nice middle-class houses all sort of look the same. That's not exactly Epic Theatre, though.

I fear the audience I was with thought this was fascinating--and, as in (say) reading Foucault translations, I worried that there was some subtle irony (or point of interest altogether) I was missing here. Was I having an off day? Does the Matrix have me?