Cloaca
The Old Vic, London SE1
Buried Child
The Lyttelton Theatre, London SEI
Primo
Cottesloe Theatre, London SEI
The audience abided by the Spacey Rules on the opening night of Cloaca, the first play at the new Old Vic. No one beeped or burped. If only the play had merited the restraint. All the good- will in the world towards this new regime couldn't disguise the fact that Maria Goos's play is flabby, inauthentic and tired.
The disappointment is great. When Spacey, having fallen for the Old Vic when he dazzled there in The Iceman Cometh six years ago, announced that he was to put his enthusiasm into action and to rejuvenate the theatre as its artistic director, excitement soared. He was the most acclaimed actor to run a theatre since Olivier took over the National. He was taking the reins at a point when the idea of the actor-manager had come back into vogue; when Mark Rylance had steered the Globe (from which he has just resigned) to popular and critical success, triumphing in the face of initial scepticism.
Spacey's programme was unexpected: apart from The Philadelphia Story , in which he will star, he has dangled the extraordinary prospect of Ian McKellen's hitherto secret ambition being fulfilled when he plays Widow Twanky in Aladdin . In this context, the choice of a new play by a Dutch playwright, unknown in this country, could have been a further piece of adventurousness; now, it just looks foolhardy.
Is it possible that something has been lost in translation (the author's own)? Cloaca has been heralded in its homeland, where it has been adapted for television and made into a feature film. Perhaps the Dutch equiva lents of: 'I can't be there for you any more' or (to a man with a habit): 'Can't you just say no?' sound other than tinny. Or could it be that Yasmina Reza's Art had less of an impact in Amsterdam than in London, so that a play about male friendship intertwined with a plot about the worth of a painting had at least novelty value?
No. It's impossible to believe that this collection of woodentops would never have made friends or kept up with each other. Their supposedly intimate memories are so off-the-peg and reach-me-down that they sound as if they've been swotted up for a particularly arid This Is Your Life.
What begins as uneasy sitcom turns all too predictably into mini-revelation and tragedy as four stereotypes unravel in various grisly, male ways. There's the nutty one (Adrian Lukis) who's done too much coke; there's the gay one (who cries and likes art and is played by Stephen Tompkinson); there's Hugh Bonneville who's a politician and a shit; and Neil Pearson, who's an actor and, therefore, a show-off and a womaniser.
Four able actors (and one woman who's there only as a plot trigger) are trapped, having to mug the thing up. Spacey's direction makes them even more one-dimensional, with the action at one pace, in a limited area, and bits of music slung down rather desperately between scenes. If only the play had lived down to its name.
You can spend a lot of time during Matthew Warchus's terrific production of Sam Shepard's 1978 play Buried Child disentangling its strange assortment of echoes. Nearly everything sounds like something else, but with an unpredictable, slightly discordant twang, as if all the cast were singing familiar words to the wrong tune.
A gruesome Grandpa, rooted to the sofa and yelling upstairs to his wife, could have snuck in from Endgame ; a nearly mute son of the soil (who rocks great forests of carrots or corn on the cob in his arms as if they were babies) might belong in Cold Comfort Farm ; the splenetic guy with one leg ('He's a pushover') has escaped from a dimly remembered melodrama.
What starts by seeming merely bizarre ends up as a kind of brilliance. After all, in a family where no one knows quite who they are or to whom they belong, everyone runs the risk of seeming like their own ghost or echo. Warchus unleashes the wild humour of the play, while Rob Howell's design, with the wooden slats of the house open to the rain slanting down like stair-rods, spooks up the atmosphere.
In an exceptionally strong cast, Lauren Ambrose, of Six Feet Under , shines as the perplexed outsider. Like much of the best Shepard, Buried Child plays like a country and western ballad: both real and cracker-barrel; at once doleful and funny about its own dolefulness.
Primo is an adaptation by Antony Sher of If This Is a Man, Primo Levi's great memoir of his imprisonment in Auschwitz. Sher takes the part of Levi, appearing in peacetime pullover and tie, bearded and bespectacled as Levi was, in front of an abstract version of the camp: grey concrete walls, patchily stained.
He is matter-of-fact and contained, speaking levelly, guided by the exactness of the chemist's prose. His abridgement is clear and, although the more than 200 pages of the book are cut to only an hour and a half, it doesn't feel skimped or rushed. Richard Wilson directs with precision. The lighting is sober; the touches of music, including the dreadful merry little band which sent the prisoners off to work, are informative. The evening avoids seeming to strive for tastefulness.
It's hard to imagine this testimony being better read. And yet there's an amplitude and inwardness in the book which never can quite be realised on the stage. Though Levi's manner was that of a scientific recorder, a chronicler of external detail, who turned away from decoration as from speculation, he managed to convey, by his very exactness, the way a will could be broken, the manner in which the brutality of the camp dominated not only waking habits but entered, too, into the texture of dreams. That is unstageable.
