Charing Cross theatre, London
There’s witty live music and convincing performances by Sheila Hancock and Bill Milner but this staging of the cult movie feels coy and dated
‘I can never understand someone refusing an experience,” chirps 79-year-old Maude, played by Sheila Hancock in this stage version of Hal Ashby’s 1971 movie. Maude is a woman who turns every day into an adventure, one that might include climbing trees, a little car theft or liberating a seal from the zoo. But Thom Southerland’s staging of a clunky stage version by Colin Higgins (adapted by Higgins from his own screenplay) may be one experience that even the indefatigable Maude would take a pass on – although I would defy anyone not to enjoy the honking seal.
The story is about a rich unhappy teenager, Harold, with a death fixation and a passion for funerals, who is taught to live by the elderly Maude, who is facing up to her own mortality. Ashby’s movie was panned on its release (Variety dismissed it as having “all the fun of a burning orphanage”), but its dark, surreal humour has turned it into a cult classic that regularly features on cinephiles’ best-of lists.
Its off-the-wall macabre comedy, which features Harold continuously trying to fake his death through decapitation, gunshot and noose to capture the attention of his distracted mother, was too much for some 1970s tastes. But that humour may now prove too tame for contemporary audiences weaned on Lynchian strangeness and the twisted, surreal visions of Charlie Brooker.
This adaptation feels dated rather than retro – despite Jonathan Lipman’s spot-on costumes. It doesn’t help that the whole thing tries to walk a thin line between the quirky and creepy, the funny and fey – and often stumbles. And, for a play about love, it remains oddly coy about the burgeoning relationship between a younger man and older woman.
Some things, though, do work well. Francis O’Connor’s design, in which the sky with its scudding clouds meets the suburban American living room, has a touch of Magritte about it. Composer Michael Bruce’s score boasts a jaunty wit, and it’s a nice touch to have it played live by the actor-musician cast. The way a musical instrument is used to stand in for a voice at the end of the phone is neatly done and comically revealing of Rebecca Caine’s self-obsessed mother, more concerned about her daffodils than her son.
It’s not Hancock’s fault that her character, Maude, is largely a walking, talking new-age self-help book dispensing the kind of advice found in fortune cookies: “Try something new”; “How the world loves a cage”; “It’s best not to be too moral – it cheats you out of life.” Hancock is mostly charming, and is bold enough to occasionally risk being irritating. But with so thin a script she can only hint at a more tragic past and a woman whose carpe diem approach to life may stem from her experiences in the second world war.
Bill Milner as Harold turns blankness into an art form – and I mean that as a compliment. He captures all the stiff, buttoned-up emotional repression of a teenager denied affection who sees faking suicide as the only way to get the attention he craves. He blooms like a sunflower turning its face to the warmth under Maude’s tutelage. If only the rest of the evening bloomed, too.
At Charing Cross theatre, London, until 31 March. Box office: 0844-4930 650.
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