THE TIMES (UK)

May 4, 2005

Has Spacey lost the plot at the Old Vic? No, it's only Act 2

Kevin Spacey's first season as artistic director has been marked with
productions ranging from the frivolous to the incomprehensible - but
there are grounds for optimism

by Benedict Nightingale



SUPPOSE P & O HAD put Ellen MacArthur in charge of that cruise liner
that never got out of the Solent. Suppose Manchester United were to
decide that Eric Cantona was the right manager to bring the glory days
back to their spluttering club. It seemed equally inspirational when the
Old Vic's board appointed Kevin Spacey as artistic director of a theatre
that had not only slumped in the league but was having serious problems
with its means of propulsion. But was asking a great performer to become
a major producer a lot wiser?

Forgive the mixed metaphors, but there's something about the present Old
Vic that churns the mind and sunders the syllables. We expected so much
of Spacey — a terrific actor, a double Oscar winner, a much-liked
person, a dedicated Anglophile and an all-round golden boy — when last
year he undertook the task of restoring the Vic's fortunes.

Maybe we've been demanding too much too quickly. I won't say he has made
a disastrous start to his job, but the Yuletide frippery of Aladdin
followed the disappointment of Maria Goos's Cloaca, and the
disappointment of Dennis McIntyre's National Anthems followed the
frippery in Old Peking. And now previews have started of Philip Barry's
Philadelphia Story, with the artistic director himself in a leading
part.

Now, I'd been looking forward to seeing this amusing piece. It won't
have us tapping our feet, like High Society, the musical movie that was
also based on Barry's 1930s original, but it may leave us rubbing our
hands in appreciation of its elegantly honed plot. However, I suspect my
own fingers will also be scratching my head. Should the Old Vic, of all
theatres, really be staging a socialite comedy whose natural home is
surely the West End?

If Kenneth Tynan, who wasn't only a tough critic but the National
Theatre's dramaturge when Laurence Olivier's company began life in the
Waterloo Road, was reviewing the piece, he'd be telling us we'd wafted
into Never Neverland.

Still, at least we'll get the chance to see Spacey himself in the Cary
Grant role. For if there was one thing unquestionably right with
National Anthems, which closed ten days ago, it was his own performance
as a Michigan fireman whose reward for rescuing a black woman from a
blaze in a welfare hotel was to be sacked for disobeying orders.

But the character's main dramatic function was less exciting. It was to
expose the cracks in the American dream as they were represented by the
wealthy, go-getting, consumption-mad neighbours he was ineptly welcoming
to Detroit suburbia.

It was a role that, when the play went through its workshops 20-odd
years ago, Al Pacino hoped to take; but he wouldn't have been much
better than Spacey, who performed it at its American premiere in 1988 as
well as at its British one at the Vic. Spacey managed everything from
fluster to bluster, nervous affability to envious rage. But there was a
faint feel of vanity production in the air. Juicy actor-friendly roles
don't necessarily make meaty audience-friendly plays — and National
Anthems veered into caricature, seemed implausible and felt alien and
dated.

Funnily enough, "dated" was the accusation levelled at Spacey's own
production of Cloaca last October. When he launched his regime with an
unknown Dutch play whose title meant drain or sewer, the critics seized
the invitation this offered, gleefully declaring it "a stinker", "needs
unblocking" and so on.

The piece was also well acted, this time by Neil Pearson, Stephen
Tompkinson and others, but it needed a lot more originality and wit to
interest us in that antique subject, the Big Chill of middle-aged
reunions and male menopauses.

Has Spacey yet got his finger on the English pulse as it's throbbing
away in the early 21st century? The prospect of The Philadelphia Story,
which is set in that upper-crust America where Ingersols speak only to
Cadwalladers and Cadwalladers speak only to God, leaves me wondering. So
did Cloaca and, even more, National Anthems.

Myself, I've lived near Detroit and so got McIntyre's references to the
arson problems of a scary city where, one Hallowe'en, a curfew was
pronounced a success because only 100 fires were lit during the night. I
even understood the tactical plays in the game of American football
that, in a prolonged parody of US macho and competitiveness, had Spacey
charging up and down a smart living room. But what was going on in the
head of the critic in front of me, who is to America's national sport
what Stephen Hawking is to pub darts? What was the rest of a
flummoxed-looking audience thinking and feeling?

Well, last Christmas's Aladdin, with Ian McKellen as Widow Twankey,
couldn't have been more English. Or could it? I had the chance to
compare it with Snow White at the Victoria Palace, which boasted Lily
Savage as the wicked queen, and, the more I thought about it, the more
the show at the Old Vic seemed a stylish parody, a pastiche panto with
plenty of traditional ingredients but little demotic pizzazz. It was an
opportunity for a great actor to take a holiday from the classics by
flouncing happily about in outrageous frocks. It just wasn't the real
thing in all its English barminess.

If one were to define Spacey's Vic as it is emerging, it would be as a
theatre for classy performance but for drama that, so far from being
cutting-edge, needs a team of highly motivated knife-grinders to give it
sharpness.

Yet one instantly has to make all sorts of qualifications. It's a bit
early to accuse Spacey of having a poor nose for writing. Didn't Peter
Hall, Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn have their flops at the National and
still run a highly successful theatre? Indeed, one might say that, by
opening with the unknown Cloaca and National Anthems rather than
revivals of Romeo and Juliet and Pygmalion, he has displayed a
refreshing courage. But the line between courage and folly can be
awfully thin and Spacey has been crossing it.

Then again, the Old Vic is a notoriously tricky theatre in spite, or
perhaps because, of its history. It is, after all, the place where
Gielgud, Ashcroft, Richardson, Guinness and Burton gave major
Shakespearean performances. It was the National's London home between
1963 and 1976. But since that company moved to its concrete Oz on the
South Bank, nobody has known how to fulfil the high expectations the Old
Vic creates. Jonathan Miller produced offbeat classics there and Peter
Hall more mainstream ones, along with a series of new plays that
sometimes seemed too intimate for a 1,000-seater. Recently, the fare has
ranged all the way from Trevor Nunn's staging of Hamlet to Elaine
Stritch's one-woman show.

Brave Spacey — or is it poor Spacey? The story goes that in late 1999
he went on a night-time wander after the London premiere of American
Beauty, taking a cab to the South Bank, walking along the Thames, ending
up outside the Vic and thinking, in his words, "What are you doing? All
you've wanted to do since you were 13 is run a theatre." He had the
clout and, after his brilliant London performance as the messianic
murderer in Eugene O'Neill' s The Iceman Cometh, the respect to do so.

He joined the board. He agreed to take the top job. Among other things,
he is targeting young and local audiences. Nobody doubts him when he
says that he's in it for "the long haul".

The question remains whether an inexperienced artistic director can give
the Old Vic a clear identity at a time when its near neighbour, the
National itself, is bringing the South Bank work of such excellence and
variety that it's hard to see where the creative gaps are.

The good news is that Spacey's name is still pulling the public and
filling the theatre. The worry is that he can't indefinitely rely on
packed houses and hasn't the subsidy to tide him over difficult periods.
What's needed is better fortune, better judgment, or both.

What's certainly needed is richer, more rewarding work.

Well, perhaps that will arrive in 2005-06, when work by Shakespeare,
Chekhov, Beckett and/or O'Neill has been mooted.

Given the good will Spacey has won in the British profession, the
willingness of actors of McKellen's calibre to come to his theatre, and
his own proven skill onstage, the future of the Old Vic can't be as dark
as we currently fear.



A CRITICAL VIEW


CLOACA

"Cloaca, I'm afraid, is a stinker, slick, superficial and as unappealing
as its title"
Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph

"Spacey's down in the gutter with this stinker"
Benedict Nightingale, The Times


ALADDIN

" 'Abracadabra' won't turn this absolute turkey into a golden goose"
Kate Bassett, Independent on Sunday

"What's missing is originality and imagination"
Benedict Nightingale, The Times


NATIONAL ANTHEMS

"National Anthems is fluent, funny, an easy watch with several clever
lines"
Quentin Letts, Daily Mail

". . . the acting isn't the problem. But the choice of play is" Benedict
Nightingale, The Times



---
The Times (UK)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk

Has Spacey lost the plot at the Old Vic? No, it's only Act 2 (The Times,
page 1)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1596183,00.html

Has Spacey lost the plot at the Old Vic? No, it's only Act 2 (The Times,
page 2)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1596183_2,00.html

Has Spacey lost the plot at the Old Vic? No, it's only Act 2 (The Times,
page 3)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7-1596183_3,00.html

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

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