National Anthems
Old Vic, London SE1
Acorn Antiques
Theatre Royal Haymarket, London SW1
One Under
Tricycle, London NW6
Kevin Specay has talked of his 'passion' for National Anthems. It's not hard to see how anyone can get along with Dennis McIntyre's play: it's neatly plotted, sometimes acutely written, and David Grindley's production is well-acted, but it's impossible to see why anyone could feel passionate about it. It falls at the first fence. This is a play which comes to satirise but hangs around being likable; it is infinitely assimilable.
An odd feature of Spacey's reign at the Old Vic is that it has featured plays disconcertingly like better-known dramas. His regime kicked off with a nullity: Cloaca was Art with the snap extracted. National Anthems is a paler, slower version of American Beauty .
It's a comfy way of feeling uncomfortable, this easy dissing of American suburban life. A youngish couple move into an estate near Detroit. He (economically portrayed by Steven Weber) spends most of his time wired up to computer games. She, obsessed by carpet stains, spends many moments in a Shake'n'Vac St Vitus dance. Mary Stuart Masterson, who makes the most of her character's skinnily defined neurosis, supplies the visual high point of the evening, tottering around in a dress which is a mini-theatre of its own, with bright swags of material looped like toy stage curtains just below her groin.
Very quickly, and very repetitively, McIntyre lets his audience know that this is a couple whose nationality has no centre: their car is a Porsche; their beer is Danish; they are turning the backyard into a Japanese garden. Humorously, insistently, they are shown to have amassed goods to protect themselves: her husband's games are a shield, his wife explains: 'All those missiles crashing into each other - it takes his mind off the world.'
It's no surprise that the set-up will fall to pieces in a significant manner Jonathan Fensom's pastel-yellow design - a perched doll's house - signals fragility, just as the massive Stars and Stripes draped above the stage makes sure that everyone knows that this is couple-as-metaphor.
Spacey is the destructive agent, and watching him take possession of the stage as he wreaks havoc is almost worth the price of a ticket. He's one of the few actors who is believable as some one who does a physically strenuous job. He's a heart-of-gold fireman who suggests power and unease with every movement: the lope, the rolling shoulders, the looking constrained in a sports jacket. He's quick, too, and produces the one moment of real theatrical vivacity when he starts a truly embarrassing game ('It's like being on a cruise ship,' his host complains).
Still, he doesn't make the case for a play devoted to the hackneyed notion that if you live in the suburbs you're likely to be morally bankrupt. This is a fusty play, draped in a moral disapproval which smudges its lack of political sharpness. If the worst thing about America were people fussing about nasty marks on the rug ... well, Iraq should be so lucky.
Acorn Antiques: the Musical is a muddle and a mess, and at least a third too long. Nevertheless, Victoria Wood's musical version of her inspired telly skit on TV soaps (of the creaky Crossroads variety) has some ridiculously enjoyable moments.
More than half of them involve Julie Walters, who's rapidly moving towards a humour heaven where she has simply to turn up to make an audience deliquesce. Some of what she does is brilliantly, lightly comic; some of it works simply by evoking her performance in the far funnier TV original; everything she does gets ecstatic roars of approval.
As Mrs Overall, the 'Treasure in a Pinny', Walters's back is so bent that she looks like a chair on castors. She takes off one apron, accessorised with Marigolds at the waist, to reveal an identical crossed-across-the-bosom item, with identical rubber gloves. She gets herself up in pink from top to toe, with a fluffy headband and a gauze skirt, and breaks into a tap dance, dragging the chorus at the pace required by her condition; she has 'an ailment below the Plimsoll line'. Finally, she achieves apron apotheosis: encased in a bronze, Olympian version of her pinny, and graciously waving rhinestone-encrusted Marigolds, she takes off from the stage in a stairlift.
The plot that enables these different incarnations is as ramshackle as an Acorn Antiques set. Bits of it reproduce the original satire, but a stage show is never going to be as sharp about television as a TV show, and there's a hole where Susie Blake dazzled as the ultra-snobby, ultra-incompetent continuity announcer. Bits of it are routine stage satire. There's a leather-jacketed director who wants to bring pubic lice to the musical, putting, as it were, the crotch into the crotchet; there are skits on Fosse, Sondheim and Les Misérables.
For most of the time, the show just lies back and basks in its talent. Trevor Nunn, who directs without any narrative crispness, squanders his. But there is juicy Josie Lawrence. Baleful Duncan Preston. And delicious Celia Imrie as the sister obsessed with her middle-aged cup-size, walking as if she's got a pole - or Pole - stuck up her backside, looking, in her tweed suit and ludicrous yellow wig, like a cross between an 18th-century courtesan and a breeder of bull terriers. Victoria Wood's lines range from the subtle - a sensitive style-seeker laments: 'Where are the beiges d'antan?' - to right-on satire. A man swoops into a crisis declaring: 'I'll handle this - I have a scrotum.'
Winsome Pinnock's new play, One Under, (her first for four years) begins with its best idea - to examine the reaction of a London tube driver who's just suffered his first 'one under' - a passenger throwing himself on to the track in front of his train. Later, a young dry-cleaning assistant totters off to impress a date dressed in a customer's slit-to-the-thigh slinky number. What a pity that these original glimpses of metropolitan life are muffled by an over-complicated plot and a spelling out of themes. And almost smothered by Jennie Darnell's direction, which creeps along at the speed of the Northern Line.
