Southwark Fair - Samuel Adamson

 Samuel Adamson is an Australian playwright who has been living and working in London since the early Nineties.  Southwark Fair was produced at the National Theatre in 2006 with Rory Kinnear in the lead.  It is a London slice-of-life comedy, very much of its time.  That time was when being gay or from Eastern Europe was the biggest thing hip young Londoners had to worry about.  Things have changed so much in the last decade that Southwark Fair is now a period piece every bit as historical as The Importance of Being Earnest or The Way of the World.  Like them, it offers a snapshot of happier, better times.  Producers should consider reviving it if theatres ever reopen.  It is genuinely funny, with interesting characters and a clever structure which goes through scenes we have already seen from the other point of view (which could be off-putting were it not so brilliantly done).  I am neither gay nor from overseas and have never lived in London, or wanted to.  Yet I genuinely enjoyed reading Southwark Fair and would happily pay money to see it onstage.

Tales From Hollywood - Christopher Hampton

This 1983 play is about the emigre German writers who found refuge from the Nazis in Hollywood: Brecht, for example, but mainly the Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich. Heinrich was the elder brother and was famous for his novels before Thomas but who was then eclipsed by his more conservative, deeper thinking sibling. By the time war breaks out both are in Hollywood but only Heinrich is reliant on Hollywood. Thomas tours universities and is tipped for the Nobel prize; Heinrich is spendthrift, bibulous and has a younger, lower-class wife, Nelly.

Our guide to this inversion of the Hollywood Dream is the Hungarian playwright Odon von Horvath, who is himself a dream in this story, given that he was killed by a falling tree in the Champs d'Elysees in 1938. But here he befriends Heinrich, pays reverence to Thomas, and responds a little too readily to Nelly's drunken flirting. The play ends badly for Nelly but not for Horvath, because he is already dead and finally, symbolically, realises it.

Hampton is one of the best writers of plays in English of the later Twentieth Century. In the Eighties it was basically between him and Stoppard, and after 1990 neither of them has written anywhere near enough. Both wear their book-learning as a badge of authority and neither has reflected deeply enough on the human condition, having both been successful from an early age. That does rather show in Tales From Hollywood.

What is it about? Displacement? Thomas Mann was permanently displaced; he wrote the bulk of his work outside Germany. Brecht wrote masterpieces like Galileo in exile and Heinrich's fame had already faded by 1940. Hovath, the child of an empire that had vanished during his lifetime, was a resident of nowhere - literally, in the context of the play. The only real displacement here is Nelly, who caught the roving eye of the man who thought up The Blue Angel and rose above her station. Tales of Hollywood is not about the writers who have no tales to tell about Hollywood, but about Nelly, who came to Hollywood with no dreams left and already out of place.

The famous writers are slightly two-dimensional, apart from our narrator, Hovath. He is a fantastic character and the best actors must yearn to play him: witty, self-deprecating, omniscient, playful, charming. And Nelly... a dream part, surely, for an actress just entering middle age. At the National Theatre in 1983 she was played by Billie Whitelaw. Casting that says it all.

Tyger - Adrian Mitchell

Tyger is a celebration of William Blake written for the National Theatre in 1971. Note that word 'celebration'. In no sense is this a play but it is theatrical and it certainly is celebratory. Mitchell is still mired in that period of reverential obscurity that follows death. He is not thought good or bad because he is not thought about at all. Mitchell was such a poet of his time - the Sixties - that one wonders what the next generation will make of him. Those of us who remember the era (OK, the Seventies was more my era but I knew who Mitchell was long before I read the original reviews of Tyger) will recognise it here, with the added bonus of hefty slices of Blake's lesser known poetry.


The problem with the text is that this was very much a musical, with tunes by Mitchell's regular collaborator, the jazz musician Mike Westbrook. Much of the dialogue and the vast majority of the poetry was intended to be sung. Without the tunes, what can we make of the words? In truth, not a lot.


The style is Ubuesque. Blake starts attacking the establishment and ends up being exiled to the moon where he starts to build his New Jerusalem. Inbetween there are some very funny spy interludes and a hilarious turn by Mad King George the Fifty. There is also a toe-curlingly awful sketch in which great poets of the past and present salute Blake's achievement in comic verse. It's a rag-bag but one which is constantly inventive, persistently off-beam and thoroughly subversive, much like its hero. A monument to its day, which I don't see being revived anytime soon.