Martin Shaw makes The Country Girl
Stage and screen actor Shaw struggles to overcome chest infection
WHAT a difference a day makes.
There was wholesale disappointment from the audience when leading actor Martin Shaw failed to make the opening night of Clifford Odets' The Country Girl at Milton Keynes Theatre last Monday.
The star had fallen ill days earlier on stage at another venue and had been off ever since.
But he was back on Tuesday night - and what a difference.
His stand-in, Peter Harding made a good, if workman-like, job in the role of washed up actor Frank Elgin who is given one last curtain call by aspiring young director Bernie Dodd but, with the best will in the world, Harding is no Shaw and many of his fans were upset that they wouldn't see the actor's performance.
I was lucky enough to return the following night and, with Shaw back in harness, it was like watching a different production.
He brought Elgin to life and his animated and aggressive peerformance lifted an otherwise pedestrian play.
So how important is a starring name to sell a play? I guess it depends on the play. Rocky Horror Show or any of the big musicals do well with a company of ambitious but largely unknown performers.
This production of The Country Girl, on the other hand, needs Shaw. The play itself struggled to engage largely because there's not a sympathetic character in the story and there's so little of a story to tell.
You were swept through one depressing backstage scene after another as director Dodd struggled to get the best out of his leading man in a play heading for Broadway.
We should care about Elgin as he fights to climb out of a bottle of Scotch, reclaim his dignity and his wife, and put his once glittering career as an actor, back in the spotlight. But we don't.
He's everything you want to hate - egotistical, needy, self-pitying and temperamental – yet through it all his long-suffering wife, Georgie, still loves him.
And Georgie? We should feel sympathy for her as she nurses his ego and persuades him to return to the profession he loves, but all she does is mope around throughout, looking like she's chewing on a wasp and wishing she could be somewhere else.
Jenny Seagrove is good in these kind of roles but sometimes you wish she could get herself a part where she's allowed to let go and have fun instead of permanently scowling and looking depressed.
Mark Letheren's Dodd wanted a good show out of the lush but he spent most of his time in a love-hate mnage a trois with the Elgins which consisted almost entirely of sniping with the wife while, unfathomably, falling in love with her.
Letheren played the director as a bag of nerves, forever living out of his next pack of cigarettes, and, like most of the characters, his part was underwritten. We learned little about his character other than he was alone and that there was an estranged wife in the background with their four-year-old daughter.
Nicholas Day is a fine screen and stage character actor who was wasted in a cameo role as the harassed theatre producer Phil Cook.
The Country Girl (the title refers to Georgie's upbringing) was set either backstage in various theatres or in the Elgin's apartment and the changes were imaginatively performed.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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