LONE STAR / PVT. WARS
King's Head Theatre, London N1
Opened 30 August, 2007
***
James McLure's 1979 diptych of Vietnam-vet three-handers is decent
enough fare; Pvt. Wars, in
particular, gets revived every few years on the London fringe. But to
be candid, this outing is obviously intended as a vehicle, since
two-thirds of the cast consist of actor and comedian Shane Richie and
James Jagger, son of Sir Mick. In such circumstances, the surprise is
that Henry Mason's production really doesn't stink.
Jagger especially confounds expectations, not just with a brace of more
than creditable performances but by his very willingness to play a
couple of dorks. In Lone Star
he commandeers his mother Jerry Hall's Texan accent as Cletis, a
small-town nobody whose casual clothes are slightly too well pressed
and who stands in an S-shaped slouch; his mere presence seems to lead
to a drunken reckoning between Viet vet Roy (still a layabout after two
years back Stateside) and his younger brother Ray. In Pvt. Wars, a kind of
military-hospital Cuckoo's Nest,
Jagger is the spectacularly prissy Natwick, who wears aquamarine silk
pyjamas instead of standard-issue hospital fatigues and who finds it
incredible that his new friend has probably never read the New Yorker.
Richie, too, is a pleasant surprise at least in Lone Star. You can see the arsenal
of casual attention-grabbing chops he deploys as Roy, but he is working
in the service of his character even through a couple of brief
misjudgements. The humour of his role in Pvt. Wars is broader, but still not
quite as broad as he plays it; his Silvio, a Tiggerish psychotic whose
genitals were shot off in 'Nam, is all shambling, bug eyes and
Brooklyn-Eyetie accent. And it should be noted that the finest
performances of all come from the sole non-name in the company: as Ray
and Gately respectively, William Meredith drops McLure's bathetic
punchlines delicately over the net and then pretends modestly that the
resultant laughs are nothing to do with him.
There are no great wonders contained herein; Roy and Ray eventually
make up, and it's clear that the trio in hospital will continue
fighting their respective private wars with their own psyches, albeit
in greater comradeship. But as prospective West End transfers go, I've
seen a lot worse and a lot more often.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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