VALPARAISO. To 13 May.
London
VALPARAISO
by Don DeLillo
Old Red Lion 418 St John Street EC1 To 13 May 2006
Tue-Sat 8pm Mat 13 May 3.30pm
Runs 1hr 45min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7838 7816
Review: Timothy Ramsden 7 May
More than it seems on the surface.
“Valparaiso, in Vienna,” I thought they were saying. It turns out that’s one of the few areas not to have such a place-name. There’s Valparaiso, Indiana (as I later deciphered it), where Michael Majeski intended to go. Then there’s Valparaiso, Florida, where an airline operative assumed he should be going. And the Chilean city where he ended up.
A media circus follows. With daily acres of newsprint columns to fill, competing local radio waves to keep occupied and daytime TV, news becomes whatever the media can stuff into their gaping spaces. What’s wanted isn’t significance but coincidence, not information but gossip. Michael, decent but undistinguished, has stumbled into his unmeaning 15-minutes of fame.
DeLillo plunges into the first interview, Michael nervously coming up with unwanted material while a sharp-mannered interviewer rejects anything not on his agenda. He knows what the news-machine will reject and how big a bite it will be taking. Subsequently, Michael’s told his whole life’s become documentary potential; he’s soon adept, producing “the interview” verbatim for notebook, camera or mike.
But it’s a process that reshapes him. Michael becomes “Michael”, the man that took that trip, edging onto the famous-for-being-famous category. The apogee’s reached in the second half, on Delfina’s daytime talk-show. It starts with her assistant warming us, the audience, up: this is a process that involves everyone. It’ so much a manufactured world even the applause welcoming the star-hostess nonentity is canned as we’re ordered to sit quiet.
Whatever the strains of having every detail of their lives as media-fodder, Michael and his wife sit it out in the glare of studio lights. He gives up the day job when it interferes with this transient celebrity, becoming as well-groomed for the purpose he now fulfils as Pinter’s Stanley is in The Birthday Party.
The world hardly needs another media satire and that’s not really what it’s got with Valparaiso. True, I had just seen Birthday Party but it’s apt. Under the slick action there’s an increasing unease that turns amateur celebrity into personal alienation, and which Jack McNamara’s cast catch in this fine British premiere.
Michael Majeski: Stephen Chance
Livia Majeski: Cristina Gavin
Male Interviewers/Teddy Hodell: Thomas Grube
Female Interviewers/Delphina Treadwell: Camilla Simson
Chorus: Lucy Cudden, Alex Gatehouse, Natasha Lee-Lewis
Director: Jack McNamara
Designer: Vali Mahlouji
Lighting: Fiona Simpson
Sound/Composer: Jack C Arnold
Costume: Havva Mustafa
2006-05-10 08:50:45