SMOKING WITH LULU. To 28 February.
Glasgow
SMOKING WITH LULU
by Janet Munsil
Citizens' Theatre (Circle Studio) To 28 February 2004
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 0141 429 0022
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 February
An intense display where the critic is interestingly more passionate than the performer.Ken Tynan peaked early, and smoked himself to a premature grave. As a young critic he captured the essence of great acting in vivid prose that still startles (despite imitation) today. And he was around to blaze fanfares for all that was new in London's mid-fifties theatre Beckett, Osborne, Brecht.
He also had an obsession with sex, spanking and an anatomical area aptly located by his toast of Bottoms Up'. And as Janet Munsil's Ken dolefully repeats - he became tagged as the first man to say 'Fuck' on live TV.
By the late 1970s, well on the way to a choking death (this play was first called Emphysema A Love Story), and writing major celeb profiles for The New Yorker he visited actress Louise Brooks, now an old lady in New York but, for Ken, a silent-screen idol.
Her Fuck' was a haircut: the trademark Brooks bob'. Freya Dominic's flowing blonde hair contrasts the sleek black pre- Beatle Fringe worn in Brooks' one non-trash movie: German director Georg Pabst's film of Frank Wedekind's Lulu' plays.
Meeting her was all Tynan could have wanted: an enigmatic performer, a silent incarnation of male sexual desire Lulu doesn't demand sex; she just evokes it. Yet Brooks, who read Proust between takes, was no fool. Now a bedroom recluse, she lusts after Ken's intellect; he's maddeningly fascinated by her ability to create Lulu from within herself, something he - for all his prose evocations of others' performances - could never do.
Nearest to it was dressing the part for a fancy-dress evening. And as he talks to Brooks, occupying his fantasies, recreating the 1928 film's images (paralleled in DVD projection), is Sarah Lawrie as the skimpily black-clad obscure object of sexual torment and desire.
Kenny Miller sets this on a gleaming pathway edged by Brooks' bed, emphasising the claustrophobic intimacy of the Citizens' Circle Studio. Dominic's Mae West-like cool, Simon Roberts' chain-smoking self-consciousness, carapace for the critics' desire to inhabit the godhead of performance and Lawrie's mix of smouldering and petulance make for a finely intense account of artistic yearnings searching for completion.
Ken: Simon Roberts
Lulu: Sarah Lawrie
Louise: Freya Dominic
Director/Designer: Kenny Miller
Lighting: Stuart Jenkins
Assistant director: Carter Ferguson
2004-02-22 23:57:11