There is nothing like a Dame: Maggie Smith in The Lady from Dubuque. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
A repeat visit to a show can be so revealing - especially when the critics have, I'm afraid, simply got it wrong. I've often remarked on the tendencies towards over-praise on this side of the Atlantic, especially in comparison with the more cutthroat approaches taken by the New York theatre press. But occasionally, the London critics round on a show for no discernible reason, as they did in March with Edward Albee's The Lady From Dubuque, the Guardian's Michael Billington being one of the few exceptions.
Well, I loved The Lady from Dubuque on its opening night and I returned to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket for the final matinee last Saturday to see if I would respond the same way again. Guess what? I loved the play, and Anthony Page's superlative production of it, even more.
As someone who has watched countless British performers cross the Atlantic to sizeable acclaim, it's thrilling to find so many New York actors in such good form on a West End stage - not stars, either, but the sorts of accomplished, jobbing players who keep the art form going week in week out, too often without praise. Jennifer Regan, Robert Sella, Glenn Fleshler, Vivienne Benesch and the incomparable Peter Francis James should all be enormously proud of their work in Albee's bitter, bruising play - though to read many of the local notices, you'd have thought a truly ensemble piece was a one-woman show. Why is that? Because of the star presence, at age 72, of Maggie Smith, marking her first West End appearance in over four years. In fact, the company bow at the end - no solo call for the Dame - said everything about the genuinely collective nature of a play in which Smith's character, the eponymous Iowan, doesn't even arrive until minutes before the close of the first act.
The play barely lasted a fortnight on its 1980 Broadway premiere, beset by accusations that Albee's writing was too obscure. That couldn't have seemed less true a quarter-century on of a script that seemed in some defining way to draw together its dramatist's ongoing concerns. As always, Albee's interest lies in the games, many of them ruthless, played by people who are staring headlong into death - literally so in the case of the ailing Jo (played by Catherine McCormack in the stage work of her career to date), who gets a surprise visit from Smith's "Lady", Elizabeth, claiming to be Jo's mother. Is Elizabeth part of the game or, more likely, some all-too-serious if balm-giving emissary of death? What was incontrovertibly true last Saturday was a performance from Smith totally free of the shtick and mannerisms this actress can turn on at will. Her leave-taking near the play's end was every bit as shimmering as her almost ghostly arrival: great acting from an artist at the top of her game.
And yet, the play is the first Smith star vehicle within memory not to have sold out, and all talk of an extension to the run was scrapped. (One assumes, too, that its New York chances are nil.) To say that this is a shame is an understatement given the inferior work that runs and runs, or that traverses the Atlantic buttressed by raves it's quite frankly difficult to believe. (Example: the recent JT Rogers National Theatre entry The Overwhelming, which heads to New York in the autumn.) As those who saw The Lady from Dubuque will know, the play is rife with direct asides and questions to the audience. So, in that very spirit, let's just say that this is what I think. How about you?
