Trafalgar Studio 1 is the most steeply
raked theatre auditorium in London. Consequently, when the chap in
front of me got out his PDA and tapped a message to show his companion,
I had little difficulty in seeing the words “This is bilge”. It was
ill-mannered of him to flash his screen (whatever happened to just
whispering?), but unfortunately the description wasn’t entirely
inaccurate.
No stage or screen drama about a rock band can escape the shadow of
This Is Spinal Tap: you either have
to build in a certain amount of self-parody, or take extreme care that
your material can’t be interpreted that way. Andrew Upton’s play about
a band reunion after ten years of separation generally tries to take
the latter course, and fails. There are the character types so
mercilessly pinned by Rob Reiner’s film: the girlfriend too dedicated
to pushing her man’s work at the expense of his creative partner (and
brother), the drummer who doesn’t get much of a look-in, the manager
who has his eye firmly on the business side and is useless at personal
diplomacy. (In a night of poor transglobal accents, Jeremy Sims’ Dick
Van Dyke Cockney in the last of these roles takes the soggy cake.)
As an irremediable rock kid, I ought to have been able to pay more, and
more respectful, attention to these goings-on: the getting-it-together
in the isolated country pile, the various insecurities and abrasions,
the substance abuse issues, above all the inarticulacy and over-purple
prose that are so often the alternating vocabularies of rock. But I’m
afraid I couldn’t. The pedant in me was working out that the numbers
didn’t add up, that Riflemind the band couldn’t possibly have attained
such legendary status in such a short career, wondering what kind of
muso it is that positions his stereo speakers so that the optimum
listening point would have him squatting on the corner of the raised
kitchen floor; the sniggering adolescent in me was noting the
aforementioned Tap parallels; and the grown-up reviewer was just being
bored. Director Philip Seymour Hoffman gets some good interaction out
of his cast in moments of camaraderie, but Upton’s script gives him far
too little help. In the central role, John Hannah is appropriately
gnomic and semi-detached, but that’s not really compelling. As rock
reunions go, this is less The Police than Happy Mondays.
Written for the Financial
Times.