|
|
 |
|
Directed by
Laurence Boswell
Designed by
Es Devlin
Cast
Mark
Simon Callow
Gladstone/
Shrink
Robin Soans
Samantha
Eggerley
Lydia Fox
Michael/Jacob/
Rupert/Graeme
Tom Beard
Gladys Powers
Beverley Klein
Kate
Geraldine
Alexander
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Duke
of York's Theatre
8 April -
7 August 2004 |
|
Beneath the clever
humour of this very funny play are several
bleak stories, all focused on the powerful,
randy, banausic but aggressively successful
publisher Mark Mellon, and his spectacular
fall from delight into delusion and
despair. It is a tale told to a Woman's
Institute meeting in ‚ is it Cheltenham?
Chipping Sodbury? ‚ ah no: Chichester
‚ some time after the events recounted:
the story of Mark Mellon's hilarious
flight and horrible fall. By no means
incidentally, it is also the story of
publishing's change from a gentlemanly
pastime to an unsentimental business,
and its effects on those involved: a
progress, or at any rate a movement,
which follows a curve that in a curious
and oblique way has the same shape as
Mark Mellon's own trajectory.
The centre
of this witty, complex and in its way
harrowing piece is ‚ as the foregoing
makes abundantly clear ‚ the person
of Mark Mellon, the only character on
stage throughout. The Mellon role is
an extraordinarily demanding one, both
in the range of emotion that it asks
its performer to scale, and in sheer
physical exertion. Simon Callow meets
and surpasses the challenge brilliantly.
He inhabits Mark Mellon with enormous
intelligence and completeness, and portrays
to perfection the character's successive
epochs of experience - the successful,
happy, coarse-grained publisher, the
irritated father, the robust friend,
the ebullient lover; then the man progressively
succumbing to jealousy and stress, the
broken neurasthenic, the humbled and
diminished individual creeping back
into the world from a mental hospital.
The tale
has a classic feel to it ‚ it is a Hogarthian
progress after all ‚ though it is not
one premised on hubris or folly, but
somehow suggests that an inexorable
logic governs the career of a person
like Mark Mellon when engaged in changing
the world as Mark Mellon does. Such,
at any rate, is the impression left
by the interpretation Simon Callow offers,
using the full repertoire of his truly
remarkable skills as an actor and interpreter.
The script seems be a protean thing
in Callow's reading of it: he makes
the story completely his own, and even
with the framing device (the lecture
to the WI) the plays within the play,
not only the moving and tragic later
episodes but the earlier farce-like
ones too, are deeply convincing.
Callow
is very well supported: Tom Beard is
prodigious as four different characters,
Lydia Fox is a stunning Samantha, Geraldine
Alexander is a sympathetic and convincing
Kate. But it is Callow who dominates
and carries the show, and it takes an
effort of concentration to realise that
the whole cast, the design, and the
direction, are working seamlessly behind
his Herculean efforts and abetting them
beautifully. This is a show not to miss:
it is West End at its best, and above
all it is vintage Callow.
AC Grayling |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
