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Operation rico london6/13/2023 “I know,” breathes his mother: “ The School for Scandal.” Maugham gives shrewd Shavian nods at those trapped by luxury and lack of education. One unwanted husband in The Circle is a furniture fanatic: he strokes a new chair as if it were a dog – or a dame – and explains it is Sheraton. It is easy to assume some encoding of Maugham’s own life as a man who, recognising too late that he was “three-quarters queer”, entered into a wretched marriage with the interior designer Syrie Wellcome. The 1921 play, featuring characters tugged between unfortunate marriages and helter-skelter romance, is illuminated by the observation that people are so unused to hearing the truth that when presented with it, they mistake it for a joke. Yet I’ve never before heard in his springy dialogue such echoes of his contemporaries Oscar Wilde and Coward. The plush and curdled society is in evidence: panama hats, satin bias-cut dresses, tennis whites, secrecy and dissatisfied spouses. Tom Littler’s production of The Circle sheds new light on Somerset Maugham. It should have been a meditative monologue. The real drama is in the debate in the head of the 91-year-old: between what she has been and now is, between what she can command and what is failing. Sebastian Croft is vigorous in a part intended (before Covid scuppered production plans) for Timothée Chalamet, yet his storyline doesn’t grip. Yet I think playwright Amy Herzog has mismanaged her material (actually the memories of her sharp political granny), pivoting the play around meetings between Atkins’s character and her troubled backpacking grandson. It is a subtle portrait, in a production by Richard Eyre that shows his particular gift for intimate, reflective theatre. Sebastian Croft, in the part originally slated for Timothée Chalamet, with Eileen Atkins in 4000 Miles. As, in long cardy and slippers, she trundles her trolley out of the room, she goes on talking, as if to say there is a life offstage and in me, even when you can’t see it. She is used to being on her own, and appears like a ghost in the lives of others. Her hands are taking over from her tongue: they flutter in front of her face, both intricate and befuddled. Atkins shows her moving in and out of an encroaching silence, effortlessly inflecting every moment. In 4000 Miles she is a 91-year-old woman whose hearing has faded and who is on the brink of losing all companionship along with her wits and her words. She makes acting look like being, not performing. Eileen Atkins has supplied many others.Įveryone should see Atkins. Superbly performed musicals with unexpected subjects – Shockheaded Peter, Jerry Springer: the Opera – have supplied some of my most memorable moments in coming up to 25 years writing for the Observer. The lights dim for Hester the self-effacing secretary, all pigeon bosom and pursed lips (and played by a chap), who delivers a love song to a long-ago, faraway soldier: the air quivers with understated intimacy. This is a good moment to be sending up stuffed shirts, stiff uppers and British entitlement (after all, “foreigners aren’t great coroners”), but the real glory of SpitLip is that the company dare to honour as well as spoof. She makes acting look like being, not performing Ian Fleming bobs up among the intelligence staff, with his idea for a hero with a tag: “The name’s James.” Outsider genius is celebrated in the form of “a lolloping sidekick”, an aquatic expert whose response to obvious questions is: “Does a newt have a penis?” Everyone should see Eileen Atkins. They cross gender they switch between toff and cockney. A five-strong cast never stop moving, across the stage and between characters: they are mostly English but sometimes German (Hitler hit off with a horizontal finger under the nose). Now directed by Robert Hastie, the production has been beefed up for the West End, with a flashier finale, but the turning-on-a-sixpence adroitness has not been lost. The talent was immediately apparent: nimbly varied, expressive music, ranging from sea shanty, to jazz to hip-hop lyrics so patteringly exact and ingeniously rhymed that Noël Coward might have flushed with envy.
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