Once In A Lifetime - Young Vic

Went today, Pretty much a full house. Audience loved it, they laughed throughout. Its very funny - not least because of  Claudie Blakley's deadpan character,  and Lizzie Connolly's  hilarious US country girl. Harry's pretty credible as the lost Glogauer

I thought the end was  clear?

Oh, just one and a third times in a lifetime.

What a bizarre play this is. One thinks of Kaufman and Hart mainly for their classic You Can't Take It With You, an affectionate comedy of eccentrics, but this one is far removed from that. Written six years earlier, in 1930, it's a VERY broad satire but not at all an affectionate one. This is satire based on resentment, written by New York theatre guys about a Hollywood they didn't really know but very much feared. The advent of talking pictures was seen as a direct threat to Broadway with actors and writers and directors all trooping out west to cash in - and that's the theme of the play.

Virtually everyone in it is a stereotyped grotesque, from the overbearing studio head to the dumb starlet to the self-obsessed gossip columnist to the uber-arch wunderkind director - all of them very funny but containing as much reality as characters in a Marx Brothers film. Not a coincidence since Kaufman wrote two of the Marx Brothers films. The intent clearly is to make everyone in Hollywood look like dummies, achieving fame and fortune in spite of themselves. And as the play goes along the message is increasingly amplified until what began as satire has morphed into full blown surrealism.

All of which rather suits the expressionistic proclivities of Richard Jones whose production picks up the weirdness of the piece and runs with it. The cartoonishness of the play is definitely to his taste and the highly stylized sets and costumes reflect that. As do the expansive performances of the cast - everyone has been encouraged to "go big" and, for the most part, it works.

Harry Enfield as Glogauer, the studio head, with his stream of consciousness bluster and his funny walk, is hilarious, an original take on a clichéd character, and young Otto Farrant as the cool and willowy German director is equally funny. The always hysterical Lizzy Connolly does a great turn as the aggressively untalented starlet and Daniel Abelson has some nice frantic moments as an underworked writer, ignored into non-existence.

But the play really revolves around three people whose journey to Hollywood forms the spine of the plot. Kevin Bishop and Claudie Blakely are both excellent as the characters who are most grounded, i.e. who most resemble human beings, but John Marquez as their dim-witted accomplice is in a class by himself. As a well-meaning imbecile who passes for smart because he can quote Variety articles from memory you know he's going to prosper in Hollywood so his performance is truly the hinge of everything - and he is amazing. Convincingly dense and sweetly sympathetic, he carries great chunks of the play. If this production is a success - and I think it is - it's because he is a success.

Interestingly there was a good house but not a full house and the crowd skewed older than one usually sees at the Young Vic. It's something different for them and perhaps not for the regulars. Too bad, it's a good, funny show.