ELLING
Trafalgar Studio 1, London SW1
Opened 10 July, 2007
****
It is certainly possible to find fault with Elling. You may feel that Simon
Bent's adaptation of the 2001 Norwegian film (itself adapted from a
novel) makes patronising fun of people with mental disturbances: the
pathologically finicky, agoraphobic "mummy's boy" Elling and his friend
Kjell Barne, a hulking, simple-minded sex-obsessive virgin. This is so,
but it misses the point. In them we see ourselves. As they are released
from their institution into an apartment in Oslo and learn to deal with
the world, their challenges are those we have faced ourselves, albeit
perhaps with less vexation: interaction in impersonal city contexts,
making friends, basic domestic coping, not running up phone bills of
4000 Kroner on sex chat lines... all right, maybe not the last one.
Yet the duo are not Everyman figures, nor are they holy fools. Elling
in particular is a creature composed almost entirely of neuroses. John
Simm, a world away from his best-known television roles in Life On Mars and most recently Doctor Who, fashions a character
who is prim and precise even when his moves seem fidgety; his Elling
reminds me of what we know of the late Kenneth Williams away from his
public clown mode. As Kjell Barne, Adrian Bower manages to lumber and
lollop at once, as if he were a zombie Old English sheepdog. Watching
the pair discover roles in life – Kjell Barne as boyfriend to their
upstairs neighbour, Elling as a guerrilla poet who leaves his verses on
supermarket shelves, secreted in packets of sauerkraut – yields one of
the most unorthodox yet enjoyable feelgood experiences in current
London theatre. Another criticism may be that it is sentimental. Well,
so what? Sentiment is only a bad thing when taken to excess; here, it
is just right.
Paul Miller's production has successfully negotiated the transition
from the intimate Bush pub theatre to the more unfriendly
amphitheatrical Trafalgar Studio, with a staging that is crisp without
being Elling-like in its precision. The Bush run sold out immediately
on the strength of Simm's name. No doubt this stint will do similarly
brisk business, but it strikes me that, if the producers so wished,
then canny re-casting could turn Elling
into the next Art: a show to
see again and again with different stars.
Written for the Financial Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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