SMOKING WITH LULU: Munsil, Soho Theatre, till 30 March

SMOKING WITH LULU: Janet Munsil
West Yorkshire Playhouse at the Soho Theatre: Tkts 0207 478 0100
Runs: 1h 30m, no interval, till 30 March 2002
Review: Vera Lustig, 16 February 2002

Fitfully brilliant but wordy play about a real-life meeting between theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and silent-screen idol Louise Brooks
A languid Ken Tynan opens and closes the play with teasing paeans to the seductive cigarette. He spends the intervening period shuttling between two women: the septuagenarian, bed bound Louse Brooks, and the dream-figure of a luscious woman 50 years her junior, who is sometimes bound to the bed – Tynan was not averse to a spot of SM.

This skittish creature, with her trademark helmet of dark hair, is film star Louise Brooks in 1928, when she played the doomed whore Lulu in PANDORA'S BOX. Clips from Pabst's film form a backdrop to the action. Since his youth, Tynan had been captivated by Lulu/Louise, and in 1978 he interviewed the reclusive Brooks for the New Yorker.

That scenario bristles with dramatic potential: the mismatch between expectation and reality, legend and fact, the youthful beauty immortalised on celluloid and the ageing flesh, feted youth and abandoned old age. There's the piquancy and the erotic ambivalence of the encounter between a fantasist and the elderly woman who was once the object of those fantasies.

Munsil seizes these possibilities. She is wrily perceptive about the way we are remembered: Louise Brooks for her hairstyle, Tynan for being the first to say 'fuck' on British TV. She writes with delicacy and fizz and a great sense of theatre.

Her instinct deserts her, though, in the middle section. Weighted down with research, the play sags, as Brooks recalls her heyday. Interesting rather than theatrically galvanising, it merely compounds the stereotype of young Louise/Lulu as a boozy floozy, albeit one with a taste for Proust.

In the sketchy, repetitious role of Lulu, Sophie Millett has a feline allure. Thelma Barlow, all waspishness, wary charm and inner regret, shines as Louise. Sadly Peter Eyre as Tynan is miscast: too shambling and cuddly in a part demanding a sexually magnetic actor who can do louche. Stephen Dillane springs to mind. As things are, the play only works above the belt. In Soho – of all places.

Cast:
Louise Brooks: Thelma Barlow
Kenneth Tynan: Peter Eyre
Lulu/Librarian's Voice: Sophie Millett

Director: David Giles
Design: Kenneth Mellor
Lighting: Michael Odem
Sound and Video: Mic Pool

2002-02-22 23:02:16