SOME GIRL(S). To 13 August.

London

SOME GIRL(S)
by Neil Labute

Gielgud Theatre To 13 August 2005
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 50min No interval

TICKETS: 0870 890 1105 (booking fee)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 25 May 2005

Emotional biography in 4 scenes leaves a question unanswered.It seems tough on David Schwimmer to be onstage throughout yet remains anonymous how generic can you get? while his ex-girlfriends have names and solid biographies. But he copes expertly with a character who is all outline, filled in only by the women he revisits on his bachelor farewell tour.

The idea 4 encounters of an increasingly close kind in 4 hotel bedrooms looping from Seattle through Chicago and Boston to Los Angeles could have become a series of mini-stories if Neil Simon had picked it up. Or a more melancholy-tinged affair from Terrence McNally. Labute makes it a moral voyage. This is tough on Catherine Tate, playing the first woman, dumped high-school sweetheart Sam. At this point the strategy's not clear, and Sam anyway is the least of his problems. But, with her searching questions, she's not so easily palmed of as he first thinks.

Alternative lifestyle Tyler throws herself at him. He resists her happily assertive physique, however unwillingly. But the older, tight-buttoned Boston academic Lyndsay, her husband outside in the car, isn't so easily discarded. She blackmails Schwimmer's Man into sex then tricks him out of it.

But it's the final, Los Angeles' scene with Bobbi, the girl he left behind when detaching to Tyler in Chicago, who lands the real punch with her $50 wedding-gift voucher and an open account of emotional bruises. It's after this that Man's phone call to his fiancée talks of eternal devotion in the flat, dutiful tones of someone facing defeat.

Moving from fidgety nervousness at his first meeting through silences when he has no answer, after plunging in with confident glibness to the Mamet-mimicking dialogue, Schwimmer's blank, self-satisfied Man is matched by a rainbow of personalities, from Catherine Tate's staid and dignified Sam, through the physical and mental fluidity Sara Powell gives Tyler, to Lesley Manville's statuesque, resentful Lindsay and Saffron Burrows' Hollywood-style depiction of suppressed emotion coming to overflow.

All these women end up more interesting than their former lover. There again, perhaps they always were more interesting. So, what enticed them to him in their various first places?

Man: David Schwimmer
Sam: Catherine Tate
Tyler: Sara Powell
Lindsay: Lesley Manville
Bobbi: Saffron Burrows

Director: David Grindley
Designer: Jonathan Fensom
Lighting: Jason Taylor
Sound: Gregory Clarke
Dialect coach: Majella Hurley
Voice coach: Patsy Rodenburg
Associate director: Tim Roseman

2005-05-30 01:20:49