THE SUNSHINE BOYS. To 19 May.
Leeds
THE SUNSHINE BOYS
by Neil Simon
West Yorkshire Playhouse (Quarry Theatre) To 19 May 2007
Mon-Sat 7.30pm Mat Thu 1.30pm & Sat 2pm
Audio-described 17 May 7.30pm
Captioned 16 May
Runs 2hr 15min One interval
TICKETS: 0113 213 7700
www.wyp.org.uk
Review: Timothy Ramsden 10 May
Simon revival gets it right big-scale and in detail.
Neil Simon’s never been cutting-edge but his plays are always finely-honed. Even when, as here, he sets himself a tough dramatic task. Separated by a quarrel for over a decade, old-style vaudeville comedians Lewis and Clark, The Sunshine Boys, meet up in age, reluctantly, to recreate a sketch for TV. Simon’s first act gives glimpses of their doctor/patient routine. So when it finally appears, it needs to seem the very best of a once-class act.
Simon is so good, he suggests the act must have been brilliant in its heyday, while showing its dated humour (a blonde, short-skirted nurse forever bending forward makes a Benny Hill gag look like incipient feminism), before finally replaying the situation for real in Willie Clark’s own life.
Unsurprisingly, there’s shadow in the later life of these sunshine boys, who can’t work together but who have withered apart (Simon provides a snappily appropriate ending). Malcolm Rennie is a splenetic Willie, if somewhat relentlessly emphatic. Dressed in pyjamas, unable to cope with his hotel-room’s doorlock, he seems at first one step nearer the dark than is evidently the case.
Lou Hirsch gives his former partner, now Clark’s bete-noire, a contrasting staidness. Shuffling on, speaking in a single vocal register, his straight-man role has evidently turned into butt of Willie’s tricks. Hirsch draws inventiveness out of apparent monotony while both show the two sides of feed and gag curdled with age and enmity.
Director Maggie Norris allows both pathos and comedy space on Katrina Lindsay’s set, which foregrounds Willie’s hotel confinement in the outer scenes, while creating sufficient spaciousness to suggest any change would further confine Willie. For the central TV recording the full stage is used, with Mic Pool’s video images recreating the crazy, varied world of showbiz all around.
The oldtime vaudevillians are splendidly supported, especially by Dylan Charles as “Uncle Willie”’s agent, a present-day voice of reason trying to persuade him to snap out of his long resentment, and Melanie La Barrie’s Nurse, attending Willie, eating his chocolates and well-able to put the querulous old man, deprived of his stage-sunshine glow, in his place.
Willie Clark: Malcolm Rennie
Ben Silverman: Dylan Charles
Al Lewis: Lou Hirsch
Patient: Andrew Bolton
Eddie: Tim Hewitt
TV Nurse: Erin Parks
Nurse: Melanie La Barrie
TV Director: Gary Waldhorn
TV Announcer: Antony Byrne
Director: Maggie Norris
Designer: Katrina Lindsay
Lighting: Tim Mitchell
Sound/Video: Mic Pool
Dialect coach: Michaela Kennen
2007-05-15 10:57:49