Posted by Bonnie on 20 March 2000 at
12:00
A time-honored British genre — the drama of disaffected idealists — is engagingly resurrected in the Donmar Warehouse premiere of "Helpless," which may well be the best play of its type not written by Doug Lucie or David Hare, both of whose work it recalls. "Helpless" marks a sometimesexasperating but more frequently enjoyable return to form for dramatist Dusty Hughes, a fringe and subsidized theater mainstay of the mid-1980s who of late has written primarily for TV.
To be sure, the play's various setups and plot pivots can be as obvious as Hughes' perhaps unwitting insistence on giving his male characters all the best lines. But there's pathos as well as charm in watching a disparate sextet navigate the shifting ideological shoals of New Labour in the run-up and aftermath to Tony Blair's election landslide. Just when it looks as if "Helpless" may be getting a bit too speech-heavy, along comes a sustained air guitar riff to "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," and a requiem for the commitment of a bygone era suddenly seems (in a retro way) hip.
You don't have to mist over at the sounds of Crosby, Stills and Nash to have a good time at "Helpless," but it certainly won't hurt. (The group's "Helplessly Hoping," heard during a scene change, usefully incorporates the play's title; so , more exactly, does Neil Young's "Helpless," which gets aired elsewhere.) Both the play — and Robin Lefevre's deft staging — are too smart to fully indulge state-of-the-nation sentiments like "17 years of a Tory government, it wears you down": this from the ex-Trotskyite "serial actor" Will (Ron Cook), who is the play's closest equivalent to an authorial alter ego. Hughes' characters remain people first and placards a distant second, even if it may be their particular curse that the two so easily get confused.
Causes, we quickly learn, have played an important part in the lives of Will and ex-wife Claire (Charlotte Cornwell), the latter a former revolutionary and African aid worker who has returned to her native England in semi-disgrace (and rebuffed by an unseen Frenchman). Embarked on her own separate quest is the couple's daughter Frankie (Rachael Stirling), who in her youth wrote a love letter to Castro (!) and is now enmeshed in a romance (or two) that is somewhat more realistic. While onetime boyfriend Ben (Craig Kelly, endearingly repeating the aggressive embrace of rejection that he perfected on TV's "Queer as Folk") pursues her over several years, Frankie instead weds her godfather of sorts, Hugh (Art Malik), a chicly attired historian who has made a mint masquerading as a bestselling woman novelist by the name of Alice Wilde (! again).
At times, "Helpless" seems to have more plot than is helpful, and Hughes' last scene could less baldly amount to one revelatory duologue after another. But the issues, thank heavens, are generally grounded in their speakers' needs and anxieties, whether Ben is juggling Frankie's farewell to him with his own frantic manning of a courier company's telephones — that scene offers Britain's own mini-variant on Off Broadway's phone-frenzied "Fully Committed" — or Will is deflecting his own middle-age malaise on to Mrs. Thatcher, who gets dismissed as "deranged old baggage from Grantham." And why not, since the Tory leader is a readier target than leftist Will's own easily bruised sense of self, especially now that he's landed a sex therapist-girlfriend Kate (Julie Graham) given to remarks like "the eggs are waiting."
Working on Tom Piper's minimalist set, the performers occupy their parts as if to the banner-waving born — though there's not a lot that Stirling, Diana Rigg's daughter in her professional stage debut, can do with the overinsistence of Frankie's supposed radiance. (By contrast, the ever-commanding Cornwell by now deserves a role not requiring her to look pained.) "Helpless" mostly belongs to its men, starting with Kelly, who gets an explosive "petrol pump" joke that audiences will be trading for years.
Malik's discernible cool, in turn, sits well with the vaguely smug Hugh, whose best friend of yore ends up being his present-day father-in-law. In a class-conscious class all his own is the feisty Cook, playing a cynic scarcely content to look back in anger when he can rail happily against the present. "I'm angry! I'm rejuvenated!" Cook's Will exclaims in a delicious moment of at least partial self-mockery. And with this actor leading the charge, "Helpless" helps rejuvenate a vanishing species: a play of ideas that are inseparable from its given community's fragile egos and ids.
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Posted by Bonnie on 16 March 2000 at
12:00
What is it about political drama? Why does something as factual as the Tricycle's 'The Colour of Justice' create spellbinding political theatre, while the same theatre's 'Collateral Damage' and, I'm afraid, Dusty Hughes' 'Helpless', feel so clunking? It's worked in the past but today nothing feels more old-fashioned or artificial than a group of people sitting round talking from a different point of view. In such a scene here you can feel the energy draining away from the stage.
On the other hand, Hughes (a former Time Out theatre editor) has plenty of intelligent things to say about the world of the 50-year-olds who seized centre stage in 1968 and have resolutely refused to move to the sidelines since. He focuses on a group of ex-Trots, including Ron Cook's likeable Will, an unsuccessful actor reduced to playing the Worried Man in a life assurance ad; his ex-wife Claire who is 'emptying the sea with a mustard spoon' trying to bring clean water to an African country; and Art Malik's smoothie Hugh who was happy to reject politics in favour of '80s materialism and now writes blockbuster novels under a woman's name. Having wandered out of Will's life, Hugh re-enters with a vengeance when he marries his friend's daughter, Frankie.
The 50-year-olds contrast vividly with their children who are not even sufficiently interested in the state of the world to watch the results coming in on the last election night. Rachael Stirling's Frankie chooses charitable causes as though she were flicking through the latest catalogue. Will's much-younger girlfriend is totally consumed by her desire to have a baby. If Hughes is harsher on the younger generation, he mocks his own mercilessly, especially the absurdity of Will's nostalgia for Neil Young, Bod Dylan and The Byrds. The play is often very funny; it's just that Will is the only person onstage who doesn't seem to have been created to represent a point of view.
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Posted by Bonnie on 9 March 2000 at
12:00
Old souls in pursuit of young love.
If anyone out there wonders whatever happened to the hard-Left, young things of the Seventies, Dusty Hughes has an answer. In his appealing comedy of disillusion and disappointment, Hughes sets his sights upon three lapsed Lefties for whom the middle-aged pursuit of love, and particularly young lovers, has replaced politics. Souls have been sold. Ideals put out to grass. And Hughes puts a genial cynicism to work at his middle-aged trio's expense. But the ample mockery to which he subjects these lost-hopers is not hostile. For Hughes was fairly far to the Left in his own youth. Helpless's rueful fun is essentially lighthearted. It never stoops to serious political argument or recriminations. But, oh, how the play looks back in witty nostalgia to a lost England of plenty when we "… had everything. Free orange juice. Free milk. Free education. Free love."
Tim Piper, who has just created a spectacular spiral staircase for the Haymarket's Miss Julie, obviously has stairs on his brain. Helpless, whose location darts between homes, book launches, clubs and public places, has no call for stairs at all. But Piper's design consists of modish stairways converging centre-stage and leading down from entrances high above us. Otherwise, the acting space is virtually bare. Into this void, which at first is supposed to evoke Soho's clubland, mooches Ron Cook's morose, 50-ish actor, Will, an ex-Trotskyist whose career has been mainly downhill all the way. A gleeful mismatching of the apparently incompatible is arranged.
When the attractve young therapist Kate appears in search of a taxi home or a man for the night, Will offers his services in both capacities. "I live in the past, I still masturbate," he explains in one of the confessions with which the play is decorated. Having drawn this incongruous couple together, Hughes then organises a comparable seduction by a man fallen further than Will has tried to rise. Art Malik's ice cream-smooth Hugh, a historian turned mass-selling novelist under cover of a female pseudonym, meets and overwhelms the young Frankie (Rachael Stirling), who happens to be the daughter of his long-lost friend, Will.
The air is briefly thick with the men's political reminiscing. Will's estranged wife, Claire, who is something big in overseas aid, turns wistful for the days when socialism was not the word that dare not speak its details. But Hughes skims lightly over things political. His 90-minute play is more a light comedy of sexual and social manners, made piquant by the gulf between the generations, than it is political elegy. Only when Will and his daughter explore his collection of old vinyl records does the mood free-fall into sentimentality.
Robin Lefevre's deftly arranged production is gifted with first-rate comic performances. Ron Cook's Will, who furtively conceals his inability to rise to the challenge of sex, makes his woebegone personality into laughing matter. Art Malik's elegantly, sold-out Hugh is just as effective. The women are not so well characterised, but Charlotte Cornwell's Claire exudes a poignant sense of isolation and regret. Julie graham makes an unsympathetic therapist while Rachael Stirling's Frankie is super-cool youth in an estuary slurry of an accent. And Craig Kelly's fall-guy love enjoys a virtuoso triumph in a scene where two non-stop telephones and one lost girlfriend keep him switching tons and tactics.
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Posted by Bonnie on 8 March 2000 at
12:00
Set in England before, during, and after the 1997 general election which resulted in New Labour's landslide victory and in Tony Blair becoming Prime Minister. The play examines the reactions of different generations as events unfold. Written by Dusty Hughes.
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