Privates on Parade, Noel Coward Theatre

It’s fairly easy to grasp why Michael Grandage wanted to begin his five play season in the West End with Peter Nichols’ 1977 military comedy. It has a brilliant, glittering central presence in the character of Acting Captain Terri Dennis. Simon Russell Beale gets to glide about the stage in armour-plated undergarments and don a series of increasingly elaborate costumes, toting a Carmen Miranda fruit bowl on his head, straddling a chair in stockings and top hat, dabbing on the “day slap” and batting his mascara-black lashes. He’s flamboyant but far from waspish, kind-hearted and soft-eyed, a paternal figure even when sporting an epic Lady Bracknell bosom and a daft Vera Lynn wig.

Nichols’ partly autobiographical play about his days entertaining the troops during the Malayan Emergency – not a war, definitely not a war – depicts what happens when Steven Flowers, an inexperienced young private, joins SADUSEA (the Song and Dance Unit of South East Asia), half of whom are reputed “bum-boys.” Russell Beale’s Terri is the lead queen, brave and unapologetic about who he is, feminising everyone’s names with abandon (Clementina Attlee and so on) and raising an eyebrow at every even mildly suggestive remark. As well as being peppered with double-entendres, the language of Nichols’ play is riddled with off-hand racism – wogs, chinks and the like – and sexism, which though true to the time and the characters, doesn’t sit easy.

That said, the play is an intriguing portrait of the tail-end of empire: corruption and cynicism permeate, the air is thick with gin and mosquitos, and the senior ranks are suitably clueless while those lower down the ladder suffer the consequences. Bonds form between the men that may not have been possible at home, and the sense of camaraderie, closeness and even love that develops within the unit is gently conveyed. An attachment forms between John Marquez’s expletive-spitting Corporal Len Bonny and Harry Hepple’s Lance Corporal Charles Bishop, but tender as it is, it comes quite late in the day and, as such, it doesn’t have the emotional resonance it might.

The action is interspersed with songs, which are charismatically performed and invested with wit and charm by Russell Beale, but they’re essentially there to let Terri don yet another astonishing frock; very often they break up the narrative flow rather than moving things forward. While the standard of playing is decent enough, apart from SRB the only performance that really makes an impression is that of Angus Wright as the zealous and ever so gung-ho, Major Flack, who happily packs the men off to the jungle where danger awaits. He’s got a rich, sonorous voice of which Grandage makes full use, but when these two are off stage the pacing tends to dip and the production feels every minute of its near three hour running time. The first half in particular seems to take an age to play out.

The production looks beautiful – Christopher Oram’s set conveys a sense of decay and dilapidation, a sun-washed, crumbling space – but while the play’s structural bagginess can be read as a comment on the British presence in South East Asia, it becomes frustrating well before the end – what’s lacking is much in the way of Singapore grip. The silent servants who shadow the characters throughout – fetching their drinks, shouldering their abuse, biding their time – are shown in Grandage’s brief pay-off to get the last laugh, but instead of coming across as a final witty twist, there’s something ever so slightly sinister about the way this is framed: it leaves behind it a faintly sour taste.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Mrs Affleck at the National

It began with the rain. As a fine mist of moisture fell across the Cottesloe stage, the coughing started. Nothing out of the ordinary at first – par for the course at the National – but then it grew louder and louder until the scene was awash with coughing, a cacophony of coughing, a cacoughany, if you will.

It’s a shame, as this scene was one of the more striking in the production, this gentle mist heightening the emotional content of this strangely unaffecting play. Despite centring on the death of a child it was difficult to give a damn about these people.

Samuel Adamson has taken Ibsen’s late play, Little Eyolf, and transplanted it to a Kentish coastal town in 1950’s Britain. We know it is the 1950s because there are superbly be-quiffed Teddy boys strutting around, numerous references to the end of rationing and the recent arrival of immigrants from Jamaica, and the women wear dresses that wouldn’t look out of place in a film by Douglas Sirk (Claire Skinner wears a stunning turquoise shirt dress in the first act). But despite such details, this act of relocation feels forced and the play sits uneasily in its new surroundings.

At the start of the play, Alfred Affleck has just returned from a trip to the Highlands, a trip he undertook ostensibly to complete a book he had been working on. During his stay, he has come to the decision to abandon his book and focus his attentions on their son, Oliver, a bright young boy disabled after an accident when he was a baby. Rita is affronted by this announcement, for she views her son as a barrier to her husband’s affections and, because he was injured while they were making love, the boy’s disability provides a constant reminder of the passion she feels she has lost.

Adamson (who also adapted Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community for the National) takes a good long time establishing this dysfunctional set up. Indeed the moment with the most action in this somewhat plodding play takes place during the interval when a team of head-set wearing techies rush out, armed with drills and lifts and things, to dismantle the kitchen set of the first act and replace it with the sea front café of the second.

The production does pick up a bit after the interval. Alfred, deep in grief is torn between his wife and the affections of his half-sister Audrey, while Rita is catapulted into an abyss of self-questioning. Despite all the emotional turmoil on display the chap next to me was checking his watch at three minute intervals come the last half hour. It doesn’t help that the production is rather awkwardly staged. Though the performance space extends forwards, with the audience arranged around three sides, much of the action takes place at one end of the set, giving neck ache to those sitting side on. A friend of mine just qualified as an osteopath, I am definitely bringing her with me if the National retain this configuration for their next Cottesloe production.

Though Marianne Elliott has directed some of the National's most vibrant productions (War Horse and Saint Joan among them), this is a static and chilly thing. She does at least draw out committed performances from her cast. Naomi Frederick makes Audrey plausibly warm, the only really likeable person in the thing, while the rich voiced Angus Wright gives Alfred a measure of charisma. Claire Skinner, in the title role, does what she can with the character as written, but her plight fails to involve the audience; I ended up wishing she’d just be quiet.

At the start of the evening, on my way in to take my seat, I passed a table laden with props for the night. A battered paperback, a football, some flowers - and a bottle of sherry. With hindsight I should have taken a swig.