Resound of the suburbs in Parlour Song
By
Nicholas de Jongh
27 Mar 2009
Not had enough adultery on your theatregoing trips recently? Feel deprived of plays about male menopauses and desperate 40-year-old chaps on new-build, suburban estates close to London, whose marriages have drifted into the sexual doldrums? You know the types — those beta minus males, hoping that if they brush up their erotic techniques and try weight-training to pump up slack, under-used body parts, their wives will succumb to born-again, bedroom bliss. Jez Butterworth’s Parlour Song duly delves into the vexed problem of marriages heading for the rocks.
Butterworth comes up with a collection of freshly dusted-down clichés and heavy-handed variations on the unoriginal marital theme, dependent on the style and manners of Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter. Welcome to a hybrid dramatist — Hal Pintbourn. An initial, noisy video of collapsing blocks is not intended as an amusing symbol of unfortunate male detumescence. Instead it introduces us to a lower middle class estate, whose identical houses are represented by segments of Jeremy Herbert’s revolving set in Ian Rickson’s neatly organised production.
Toby Jones’s demolition expert, a crashing bore called Ned, is hard at it, explaining to his handsome, buff neighbour, Andrew Lincoln’s Dale, who serves as narrator, the difference between a Designated Drop and Predicted Debris Area.
Butterworth overlooks the fact that a conventional bore like Ned, who is later allowed an interminable story of how he bought a birdbath in Gloucester and found true love, inevitably induces boredom himself.
Jones, a natural-born clown, a little of whom sometimes goes too grotesquely far when playing straight parts, represents Ned as an increasingly disturbed man, whose personal possessions, from silver-backed hairbrushes to old golf-clubs, are mysteriously vanishing — symbolic disappearances rather than real ones.
Once Ned begins a fitness, weight-lifting, hair-regaining programme, under Dale’s helpful supervision, Jones offers his popular anthology of groans, grunts and facial contortions as he vainly tries to make a new man of himself.
Sections of the first-night audience, responding with huge laughter to such ordinary ripostes as, “Well, that’s that” or, “I’d lose my head if it wasn’t screwed on” clearly saw in Ned a comic-pathetic, male menopauser, easily cuckolded: in one scene Jones listens to a helpful guide to cunnilingus and adds in his own extraneous hand gestures. When his wife appears, his gestures morph into an imitation of Eric Clapton on guitar: Butterworth’s characteristic blend of low-grade comedy and mild farce may be manna from heaven to some, but it leaves me cold.
But Amanda Drew as Ned’s wife Joy, a cross between the lubriciously cool heroine of Pinter’s The Homecoming and the transforming femme fatale of The Lover, first exudes a fine, bored hauteur in Ned’s hopeful presence and smouldering ardour for Dale.
That the adulterous lovers never run away and that the dream-struck Dale rediscovers his possessions comes as no surprise. Butterworth’s hints of violence, misery and longing remain, like the play itself, superficial and
skin-deep.
Information 020 7359 4404. Closes 9 May. www.almeida.co.uk
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Reader views (5)
A dull boring vacuous production which has no narrative drive or distinguishing features, might suit a fringe venue( out of town) there are no redeeming features for this meaningless piece, but hey the good news is that the non discerning will love it---and might even find it funny. LOL
- John Rea, london, 01/04/2009 23:21
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Toby Jones completely stole the show. He's an amazing presence on stage. Didn't notice the other two.
- Ollie, Islington, 30/03/2009 12:20
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Anya, what rubbish!
This is a fine piece of work with good dialogue, great acting, good direction, brilliant design.
Well done all involved.
- Cyd, London, 30/03/2009 09:48
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Anya I hardly think you are being fair I think it was a great production and it certainly was not amateur. Theatre does not have to be all high brow!
- Andy Tischen, London, 29/03/2009 23:44
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This play should never have left the rehearsal room in its' current state. An amateur "boys production" which stinks of arrogance and lack of respect for a paying audience. Amanda Drew does her best to lift the limited sub text but even she can't save it, disappointing and sad that the old boys net work is still alive and kicking in a theatre that should know better.
- Anya Wright, london, 27/03/2009 10:50
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