Hotels are having a theatrical moment. At the beginning of the year, Robert Icke’s production of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever set out to provoke audiences by unleashing its aggression about privilege in the swish suite of the May Fair hotel. Now Defibrillator, who last year performed Tennessee Williams’s Hotel Plays in the Langham, present The Armour, commissioned for that hotel’s 150th anniversary.
Ben Ellis’s play is actually three playlets, each performed in a different room. They are loosely linked by a recurring garment, and by the theme of departure. They are separated by a flight of steps – or hideously upholstered lift. The audience, not helped by any linking narrative, sees all too much corridor carpet.
The first and slightest stars Hannah Spearritt – once of S Club 7 – as a pop diva in glitter heels and panda-eye makeup who can’t decide whether she’s going to make a comeback: “I’m sick of not being taken seriously.” She needs her manager to tell her she’s worth it. He did not convince me. The second is set in the 1970s, when the hotel was taken over by the BBC. A young American couple are trying to escape from a Vietnam-haunted past and to have a quick snog before a radio producer starts recording. The dialogue is crammed with discussion points, but the attempt to evoke the period is desultory: a round BBC clock, a vertical microphone, a few institutional instructions. I worked in the place back then, before the lavs were called “restrooms”, when men in bow ties still quaffed pink gins in the BBC Club and the lifts were operated by war veterans. Hardly any of that flavour has seeped through.
In the scene that uses the space best, a couple imagine they are elsewhere. It’s 1871 and the Emperor Napoleon and Eugénie are surrounded by rubber plants and other succulents. The air is hot with burning candles. They might be in the tropics. He lives in the past, when he can remember it. They fantasise that their chaise longue is a boat wafting them away. Dreams of escape bring home the actuality of the present. Not much else does that here. The Langham seems to have occasioned rather than inspired The Armour.
