HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ALICE: Farrell, Orange Tree till 18 May

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR ALICE: Bernard Farrell
Orange Tree: Tkts, 020 8940 3633
Runs: 2h 30m, one interval, till 18th May
Review: Vera Lustig 26 April 2002

Transfers to The Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough: in rep to 6 July 2002
Tickets 01723 370541

Play that contrives to be both naff and nasty, though moderately chucklesome.
Tilda Swinton once declared that it is impossible to give a good performance in a bad play. She should beat a path to Richmond. As rural Irish widow, Alice, shuttling effortlessly between spry old age and young motherhood, Caroline John excels. She's serene yet alert and sexy, gently amused by her grown-up children's attempts to bundle her off into a nursing home.

She stands in stark contrast to her cardboard offspring, blustering Barry and domineering Barbara. Travelling to Ireland from Basingstoke and California respectively, they descend on Alice every birthday, with their partners in tow, bearing ostentatious gifts and nursing-home brochures, whose purple prose they read in hushed tones. They are perplexed by the presence of Jimmy, Alice's hearing-impaired friend: cue a welter of farcical business.

I found the play both baffling and distasteful. The motivation for shooing Alice into a home is flimsy, and there's no sense of there being a family with a shared past, though there's a felicitous physical resemblance between the actors playing the siblings. The gruesome twosome are too blatantly unpleasant – the play would work far better if their ulterior motives remained a bit more, well . . . ulterior. What has turned Barbara into a screeching, pill-popping harridan (played at full throttle by Teresa McElroy)? Is it just her bringing-upky? If so, that hardly reflects well on lone mum Alice, whom Farrell has set up as a paragon.

Barry's English girlfriend (a fine performance by Roisin Rae, developing from giggling bimbo into warm-hearted young woman) makes a revelation that should shift the play into a different gear, but doesn't. Before walking out on Barry, she accuses him of having hit her, making her miscarry. This causes no ripples. Farrell writes a moralistic play, while seeming to inhabit a moral vacuum.

In brief: to those sad souls who could not imagine their own parents having sex, this celebration of geriatric love may prove enlightening. Otherwise: phooey.

Alice: Caroline John
Jimmy: Barry McCarthy
Barbara: Teresa McElroy
Barry: John Paul Connolly
Cormac: Paul Boyle
Sandy: Roisin Rae

2002-05-08 19:57:20