In Howard Jacobson’s hilarious, award-winning, semi-autobiographical novel of 1999, the first-person narrator recalls his experiences growing up in a Jewish family in 1950s Manchester – an introverted youth, saved from solitude by a talent for ping-pong. Jacobson loops, chops, flicks, smashes and drives his mock-heroic prose across the page. Rumbustious language elides past and present, winds readers through multiple realities, shifts scales of perception seamlessly from knowing adult to unfurling adolescent. In the novel (as in film and television), time and space are infinitely malleable; readers (and viewers) traverse them as easily as subatomic particles passing through matter. On the stage, though, creators and receivers share the same sensory physical reality. Here, the relationship between the story world and the imagination of the audience is formed not only by words (or images and sounds) but by their relation to actions carried out by actors whose gestures alter the air around us.
Simon Bent’s adaptation, directed by Jonathan Humphreys, amuses and charms. What it doesn’t do is put the spin on the material that would propel it into drama. The adult Walzer, speaking directly to the audience, conjures characters from his past: family, adolescent friends, love interest. Sometimes he re-enacts events with them (ping-pong playing is spectacularly managed; his father’s market goods-filled van makes an eye-popping, smoke-belching appearance). But where there should be conflict and dynamic change, there is only confrontation (his father fuming outside the toilet door behind which the teenage Walzer is reported by his adult narrator self to be doing unspeakable things; his parents’ epic shouting matches) followed by an edit to the next event.
We watch this life but we do not emotionally engage (as we do, for instance, with the narrator/actor figure in Margaret Edson’s Wit or with the narrator/storyteller in Danny Braverman’s Wot! No Fish!!). Which is a shame, because this is a lovely production – beautifully lit (Lizzie Powell), scored (Ben and Max Ringham), movement directed (Aline David) and acted. Elliot Levey is an appealing Walzer (all twinkly eyes, masses of hair, self-deprecation and slightly hunched stance – a sort of Mr Tiggy-Winkle) and holds the stage admirably for more than two hours. His fellow players are all sharp, vivid and funny. Together they deliver an amiable entertainment but a dramatic dead ball.
