TERMS OF ENDEARMENT. To 1 December.

Tour

TERMS OF ENDEARMENT
by Dan Gordon based on the novel by KLarry McMurtry and screenplay by James L Brooks.

Tour to 1 December 2007.
Runs: 2hr One interval.
Review: Alan Geary: 1 October 2007 at Theatre Royal Nottingham.

Without being massively profound, it’s touching and life-affirming.
One of the best lines in this play, an adaptation from the novel as well as the more famous screenplay, comes when Aurora (Linda Gray) asks Garrett (John Bowe) in for a coffee. “I’d rather stick needles in my eyes,” replies Garrett. If you know the film, it’s noticeable how different Bowe’s delivery of the line is from Jack Nicholson’s.

All three principals try and succeed in distancing themselves from the interpretations of character associated with the eighties award-winner.

In a packed first-night house, many people had come to see Sue Ellen from Dallas. Somehow it wouldn’t have been surprising if Gray had been less than excellent - she wasn’t. Admittedly, at the very start she employs slightly soapy gestures but things soon improve; by the second half her performance is measured and realistic. Despite her big mascara-surrounded eyes and well-managed profile and figure, Gray makes Aurora look blowsy when she first appears in dressing-gown and slippers. Ten years widowed, she’s sexually-frustrated. But by the end, despite everything, she has re-discovered her attractive self.

Bowe, as ex-astronaut playboy Garrett, initially eschews anything involving obligation or commitment; in his very first scene he’s piling home plastered with a big-haired bimbo called Doris. But he too changes: the scene near the end where he threatens the jobsworth doctor (a splendid Robert Fitch) is not only tremendous fun; it shows Garrett as principled and loyal.

As the animated and vivacious daughter Emma, Suranne Jones might be the best thing in the play. There’s no mawkishness when she announces her terminal illness; there’s a hard-bitten but humorous practicality about her. In the end she and her mother have become best friends. A double-location set design is ideal for the daily phone calls between Aurora and Emma, via which much of the plot develops.

We get brief but telling glimpses of Emma’s infancy and childhood, and a lot on the ten-year period between her marriage and her mother’s first date with Garrett. No-one ages particularly, but, what with all the talk about André Previn and Mia Farrow, it’s nicely in period.

This is an absorbing but undemanding slice of life, a comedy in the sense that real life is comic. Without being massively profound, it’s touching and life-affirming.

Aurora: Linda Gray.
Emma: Suranne Jones.
Garrett: John Bowe.
Rudyard/Doctor: Robert Fitch.
Patsy/Doris/Nurse: Katherine Heath.

Director: David Taylor.
Designer: Judy Godfrey.
Lighting: Oliver Fenwick.
Sound: Clement Rawling.
Dialect coach: Tim Charrington.

2007-10-02 15:32:33