My Brilliant Friend – Royal National Theatre Friendships between women are different from friendships between men. I speak, you understand, as one who has made a study of men but never actually been one. In my observation, men can be best friends from primary school to nursing home without ever having shared anything more profound than opinions about issues which don’t affect them personally. They can wax enthusiastic about cars women, or sports. Some can talk about books, some about art or business, some can discuss science or politics. Some can even talk about feelings but not with one another, only with women. Oh, they can talk, all right, but sharing is an alien concept to most men, whether a feeling, a betrayal, or a recipe. On the other hand, women can/do talk with one another about anything, the most intimate or profound, and the most frivolous, even when they’ve just met. Friendships are made in seconds and often last a lifetime. Which is why it’s intoxicating to spend five hours in the National Theatre contemplating a complicated friendship between women. Two little girls from a crumbling neighbourhood in Naples meet just after the War and, with that insight that every girl knows and every boy doesn’t, recognise that they will be friends for life. Whether they like one another is irrelevant, actually they don’t much, but there is a bond, forged over mutual cruelty to their dolls, that informs a relationship that they both know, instinctively, will be lifelong. From now on, whatever life they embark on, they will be inextricably bound, one to the other. My Brilliant Friend charts that bond over sixty years, exposing the splits and fissures in their lives and experiences, the twin influences of the Mafia and Fascism, the effect of education on one and the lack of it on the other, the repeated betrayals by their men mirroring the betrayals of their mothers by their fathers. Heredity and its limitations, violence and reward, poverty and success, couched within the narrow traditions of Italian Catholicism, all take their toll. Above all, the sense that being a girl doesn’t count for much, is always before them, holding Lina and Lenu in the grip of its inevitability. This is their tragedy, even when one transcends all the restrictions to become a successful writer and the other blazes above her class with unquenchable fire, they are still two little girls from a poor Naples neighbourhood, looking for approval from parents, men, and each other. I had read Elena Ferrante’s four novels, watched the television adaptation too, so I knew what was going to happen but the magic of theatre took me over as I became engulfed in the teeming noisy Naples neighbourhood and the lives of its untidy inhabitants. I saw both plays on the same day, which I recommend, and was entirely taken over by Melly Still’s mesmerising production. The set is simply two moveable staircases on the enormous stage of the Olivier which sometimes seems very empty and at others it takes on life but, despite the huge cast, it becomes clear that there are only two characters who demanded our attention – Niamh Cusack’s ever-changing insecure Lenu and Catherine McCormack’s charismatic but damaged Lina – and that these two are the whole point of the five hours. Their friendship, their abilities, their jealousies, their insecurities, and their personalities, sometimes jelling, more often fragmenting, are the fascinating focus of My Brilliant Friend. And which one is brilliant? When Lina’s parents refuse to let her continue to secondary school, despite her being the best pupil in the school, she sits down and writes a book. She gets it published too. But it’s Lenu who goes to college and becomes a writer while Lina marries at 16 and works in the family shoe shop, stymied at every turn. As they grow up and their lives diverge, their friendship stays their bedrock, now toxic, now reformed, now fallen into disrepair, but the thread that holds them together will never really break. We ‘girls’ know that friendships like that never do. Curtains – Wyndham’s Theatre This show is a sad story in several ways. It was the final show the great Kander and Ebb wrote together before the sudden tragic death of Fred Ebb while Curtains was still unfinished. If you can’t place them, John Kander and Fred Ebb were the song writing team who, over 40 years, wrote Cabaret and Chicago, more than 20 other Broadway musicals (by my count and I may have missed a few), and nearly 2000 songs. Curtains is far from their best although there are some good songs, notably a Broadway songwriter mourning the loss of his partner, I Miss The Music, an almost unbearably sad echo of one half of a partnership without the other. It is impossible to hear this song without thinking what an immense loss both to John Kander and to us, the audience, was the death of Fred Ebb. This was always a star-crossed show where not only did Ebbs die before the songs were done, but the original book writer, Peter Stone, died before the script was completed, replaced by Rupert Holmes who never quite got ahold of it as the second half is an unholy mess that ought to have been sorted out before opening night. It’s a murder mystery set during the rehearsals for a Broadway musical and the leading man is the detective in charge of finding the murderer of the leading lady. On Broadway this was David Hyde Pearce, a charismatic actor who took on this meaty role and made it a tour de force, despite any shortcomings in the material. In the West End the detective is played by a roly-poly radio and TV presenter called Jason Manford of whom I had never heard and don’t expect to hear from again in a theatrical context. Somebody apparently thought this nice man with no stage experience could be a romantic leading man. They were wrong. The great team of Kander and Ebb deserves a better send off than this. Teenage Dick – Donmar Warehouse Teenage Dick is Richard 111 set in an American high school. Building on Shakespeare’s description of Richard’s disability (not, by the way, borne through in historical fact) as “deformed, unfinished, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up,” Mike Lew’s play, first seen at the prestigious Public Theatre in New York, makes Richard, or Dick, a teenage monster. Daniel Monks, a remarkable young actor who is, himself, disabled, flies around the stage on his single crutch with amazing physical fluidity, even at one point performing a creditable pas de deux with his Anne (Sienna Kelly), although she does all the heavy listing. As Dick’s machinations become darker, his best friend (Ruth Madeley as Buckingham, sorry, Buck) remonstrates from her wheelchair, and their sympathetic teacher (Susan Wokoma as Elizabeth York) tries to channel Dick’s more underhanded schemes - he wants to be elected Class President - into more positive activities. There are some funny ideas, especially if you know Richard 111, watching Lew’s attempt to parallel Shakespeare in a modern American school, which sometimes works and often doesn’t. Michael Longhurst directs with his usual efficiency and the entire cast throw themselves into the parody with admirable commitment. It’s just that, despite the important things the play has to say about disability and acceptance, and the first class professionalism of this production, Teenage Dick would surely have a more receptive life in a youth theatre production where its accessibility would be a positive asset.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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