It’s hardly uncommon to see an
actor revel in playing an unpalatable character, but seldom do you
encounter a pair of them sparring with such enthusiasm as Kathleen
Turner and Ian McDiarmid in this two-hander. This is Turner’s first
London appearance since her volcanic Martha in
Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? in
2006, and she seems still to be glorying in the liberation from her
longtime scourge of rheumatoid arthritis. As trailer-trash ex-bartender
Maude she is positively bullish, using the F-word like a comma and
bouncing off the walls of the deliberately overdressed set as well as
off McDiarmid. He, in turn, savours every syllable of acidic sarcasm as
the arrogant, prissy Lionel, who has flown to California from New York
to give his verdict on the authenticity of the painting Maude bought
for three bucks in a junk shop and now claims is a Jackson Pollock.
It’s such a very McDiarmid role that he disdains even to attempt the
accent; writer Stephen Sachs has evidently added a couple of
perfunctory extra lines to explain Lionel’s Englishness.
The delight is in the performances rather than the play. Sachs has some
so-so ideas about authenticity in art and (inevitably) people, but when
he hammers them out they tend towards the trite rather than the
profound. He is similarly unimaginative with his plotting: the way to
unbutton Lionel is to dose him with whiskey so that he gets positively
ratted within 20 minutes, then shrugs it off after another 20, and as
sure as Rothko liked red you know that Maude’s inevitable hidden sorrow
will be connected with the photograph she objects so ferociously to
Lionel even touching. Still, neither Sachs nor director Polly Teale
stretches matters beyond their natural bounds; it is all over in barely
an hour and a quarter.
And it is pretty delectable while it lasts, from McDiarmid’s sour
smirks and Turner’s bellowing blowsiness to Tom Piper’s set, which
looks if he has taken every single item ever hitherto pruned away
throughout his career of normally understated designs and shovelled
them on to the same stage. Although Lionel’s opinion is predictable
from the word go, the play itself offers no verdict on the genuineness
of the painting (we never even see the front of the canvas), but as for
the evening, it looks glorious but it ain’t art.
Written for the Financial
Times.