THEATRE

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THEATRE

The premiere was delayed for an hour while the company rallied round with towels and squeegee mops, and when the audience was finally admitted into the auditorium, the show's director Nicholas Hytner, took to the stage in classic headmasterly fashion to apologise to the audience and to thank his "boys" for manning the pumps. All of which gives me less time than I would like to commend a play that strikes me as one of the finest Alan Bennett has ever written. The first thing that you notice is that he is in spectacularly effervescent comic form. His account of a group of clever schoolboys at a northern grammar school in the early eighties, studying for Oxbridge entrance exams, is packed with superb one-liners that are surely destined to enter the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. The poet Philip Larkin is unforgettably dubbed "The Himmler of the accessions desk" and many will share Bennett's view that "The chief enemy of culture in any school is the headmaster". But this is a play with depth as well as dazzle. The piece contrasts the humane liberalism of the old English teacher Hector, beautifully played by Richard Griffiths, who believes that teaching is about opening minds and hearts, with the cut and thrust of a new supply teacher, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore). Irwin takes the fashionable counter-intuitive view of history (for instance, that Pearl Harbour caught the Japanese, rather than the Americans, napping) and has all the slick exam techniques and pithy quotes needed to ensure the Oxbridge success so desperately craved by the school's vile headmaster (a brilliantly creepy Clive Merrison). There is, of course, no doubt about whose side Bennett is on and, in the character of Irwin, who later ends up in the Government, we see a masterly caricature of the slick soundbite culture that bedevils our political life today. When Irwin insists that "the loss of liberty is the price that we have to pay for freedom", there is no doubt that Bennett has Blair in his sights. But the play is intensely moving as well as thought-provoking and funny. Dear old Hector is discovered molesting his pupils – who actually take his clumsy attentions entirely in their stride as schoolboys do – and faces the squalid end of his career. The scene in which Griffiths breaks down in front of his class after discovering that he has been caught is almost unbearable in its vulnerability and tenderness. There are terrific performances, too, from Frances de la Tour as a wry, dry history teacher, and from all eight of the young actors who brilliantly individualise the boys, with Samuel Barnett shining particularly brightly as the sad, gay Posner. This is a wonderful evening, as heart-catching as it is hilarious. Let's just hope the sprinklers don't rain on Bennett's glorious parade at future performances.-Charles Spencers.

Loneliness played to perfection

Photo: Moving: Rattle of a Simple Man.

At the time of its West End premiere in 1962, Charles Dyer's Rattle of a Simple Man probably gave the theatrical censor, the Lord Chamberlain, serious pause for thought, while many members of the first-night audience doubtless concluded that it was far too risqué for their maiden aunt. Now it seems, initially at least, almost quaint in its innocence, a reminder of the vanished world we inhabited before, as Philip Larkin wittily put it, sexual intercourse began in 1963. The play is virtually a two-hander, set during a single night when Percy, a gauche Mancunian down in London for a football match, accepts a £50 bet from his mates to go off with a prostitute. One quickly realises that it was only the drink that persuaded him take on this highly uncharacteristic challenge. As he arrives at Cyrenne's basement bed-sit, this tongue-tied middle-aged virgin who lives at home with his mum and works as a number-cruncher in the research department of the local mill, is overcome with embarrassment and shame. The worldly prostitute quickly sees through his deeply unconvincing claim that he has seen hundreds of women in their underwear, and if he wasn't feeling poorly from all the beer, and fearful that his mates might be waiting outside to see how he's got on, Percy would soon be beating a retreat with his tail between his legs. Cyrenne, however, though not quite the conventional tart with a heart – she has a sharp wit, and it becomes clear, pressing problems of her own – takes pity on him. And though the ensuing action is sometimes excessively wordy and occasionally sentimental, the play becomes at best a powerfully affecting study of two lonely people suddenly finding the strength to admit their weaknesses and help each other make it through the night.

With duff performances, I suspect Rattle of a Simple Man could prove penitential, but Michelle Collins, best known as Cindy Beale in EastEnders, and Stephen Tompkinson both play it to perfection, finding all the piece's rueful comedy and sudden moments of deep emotional pain in John Caird's lovingly detailed production. His choice of the marvelous songs of Dusty Springfield to provide the soundtrack, though slightly anachronistic, suits the bittersweet mood of the piece perfectly Tompkinson is in superb comic form as the hapless Percy. He can't open his mouth without putting his foot in it, and his shock at even the mildest "bad" language is richly comic. But this fine actor beautifully opens up the pain and vulnerability of this superficially absurd character, and his confession of abject loneliness, and the fear that he might not be "normal" when it comes to sex, wrings the heart. Collins, too, is deeply touching as a woman who has invented a romantic fantasy life because the memory of childhood abuse is too painful to live with – though the play is at its weakest when her brother arrives in the second act and the reality is clumsily exposed. Collins hovers tantalisingly between the sexily hard-boiled and the achingly needy, and, by the end, you are absolutely longing for these lost souls to get into bed with each other. Dyer is still with us in his eighties, and Rattle of a Simple Man forms one part of a trilogy of plays he wrote in the Sixties about loneliness. On the strength of this production, the current neglect of this humane and compassionate dramatist seems incomprehensible, and I hope other theatres will now be encouraged to revive the other two dramas he wrote about what the Beatles described as "all the lonely people". You know you are getting old when plays written in your own lifetime have mysteriously turned into period pieces. -C. Spencers.