William Goldman’s famous Hollywood maxim
“Nobody knows anything” dates from half a century later, but might have
been the motto of George S Kaufman and Moss Hart’s first stage comedy
collaboration in 1930. It tells of three small-time vaudevilleans who
go west to break into moving pictures just as the talkie era is born;
two of them are hucksters of differing kinds, but it is the third, a
holy fool for whom things keep going insanely and inexplicably right,
who really makes his mark in the authoritarian Glogauer Studios.
Kaufman & Hart’s Hollywood (as revised by Hart’s son Christopher)
is a frantic place where nobody, indeed, knows anything but everybody
is chasing something pell-mell. It’s puzzling, then, how absent the
frenzy and chaos are from Richard Jones’ production. It makes sense for
the rather dim guru-by-accident George to remain comparatively
unflapped whilst all explodes around him, and John Marquez brings an
innocent calm to the role reminiscent of Mark Rylance at the centre of
the sexual shenanigans in
Boeing-Boeing.
However, Kevin Bishop’s Jerry seems assured rather than keen to hustle,
and impressively sardonic though Claudie Blakley’s performance as
self-declared elocution expert May is, it’s often somewhat at odds with
her insight into the precarious nature of the whole place. A playwright
who suffers an onstage breakdown in frustration here seldom even raises
his voice, and the role of the tyrannical studio head Glogauer is
something of a waste for Harry Enfield in his theatrical début. Enfield
is so under-directed that he falls back on the kind of two-armed
gestures characteristic of an inexperienced actor, belying his
thirty-plus years of acting chops, albeit in character comedy on stage
and screen rather than theatre as such.
Hyemi Shin’s revolving design is clever, but rather gives the game away
that this is a 21st-century caricature of 1920s settings. Jones’s
staging, too, suggests that his idea of our own age is that it does
not, perhaps cannot, get too excited about anything. With a little more
oomph and the tactical deployment of an extra ten decibels or so, this
could elicit guffaws rather than chuckles.
Written for the Financial
Times.