Dundee Rep
Love - pardon my French - comes in spurts. The hard part is keeping a
tight grip on what you've got. Too tight though, and you're left with nowt but
a notch on the bedpost and a bittersweet memory of what might've been. But,
hey, that's the sort of romantic guff - however true - that makes playwrights
like Terence McNally so darned popular. His plays ditch plot like a cheap date
in favour of everybody's favourite piece of tittle tattle - Relationships And
How To Do 'Em. Or not, as the case may be.
McNally champions the little guy on the
ropes, gets him together with the small-town girl, and lets 'em at it.
This is the basic premise of his 1987
hit romantic comedy, which thrusts together this pair of downbeat lovers -
already a legend, if in name only - and hopes for the best. Dundee Rep
associate director Michael Duke's production begins in the dark, with the pair
abandoned to the last lengthy gasp of the ultimate intimacy. The post-coital
joie de vivre doesn't last long, and what follows is like a striptease in
reverse, which sees them go hot and cold on each other like the striplights
bickering in the city outside, stopping, getting ready, then, when the coast is
clear, go-go- going.
Ex-con Johnny is a short-order chef with
poetry in his soul, already at ease with his own perceived mythology. He
believes in soul mates, coincidence and kindred spirits, while waitress Frankie
is more jaded, more used to brief meat-'n'-two-veg affairs than anything
appertaining to romance, which is why Johnny is such an in-yer-face shock to
the system. Round and round the garden path they go, in search of that ever
elusive good time, both knowing they don't make Saturday nights like they used
to.
Like the relationship itself, this is a
hit-and-miss affair, something that comes as no surprise considering Tom
McGovern and Maureen Allan are on stage together throughout the play's full two
hours. While physically brave in capturing the full pas de deux of what passes
for courtship in dysfunctional and suspicious times, in the first act at least
they don't fully give the feeling of baring their souls the way strangers do
over the course of one night. Only in the second night do they relax, un-self-
consciously bouncing off each other via a truckload of deadpan New York
cynicism, only occasionally slipping into stock-in-trade American method-
u-like pastiche mode.
For a play alluding so much to music,
fine-tuning is probably all it needs and, given a bit of settling in, one of
the great theatrical duets should be delivered confidently enough for what's
required. Richard Edmunds' design, at once impressionistic and realistic, helps
matchmake beautifully, its veils allowing us a sneak peek into just one of the
eight million stories that go on in the throbbin' heart of the city. Ah, but it'll
never last.
The Independent, January 31st 1997
ends
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