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t h e a t r e

"The Showman" (at the Almeida Theatre, London)

by Matt Wolf

 

THERE'S a cast of seven in "The Showman," the new production at this year's Olivier Award-winning Almeida Theatre, but don't be fooled; Austrian dramatist Thomas Bernhard's play amounts to a one-man show, and an unusually obnoxious one at that. Imagine Pirandello rewritten by John Osborne, and you begin to get the idea -- theatricality has rarely been so bilious.

On the evidence of his previous "Elisabeth II" and the new play, Bernhard's method is clear: Place an angry, aging curmudgeon centerstage, and 100 minutes or so later give the audience a coup de theatre to justify the accumulated spleen that has been vented before. Whether the Almeida's public will find the wait worthwhile is open to debate, not least because Alan Bates' marathon performance never exerts the cunning allure Julian Curry brought to his Herr Herrenstein in "Elisabeth II."

Bates delivers a laborious tirade, not a self-consciously grandiose gesture from a character even more smitten with his own voice than he is disgusted with the world. Partly, too, we've been down this rancorous path before: a preening actor stuck in the provinces inveighing against everything from "the fistula of Europe" to the decline in verse-speaking and the brackishness of the local water. The existential musings near the end--"all our lives [are] in thrall to the absurdity of having been born," Bates' Bruscon snarls--seem like authorial interruptions, not natural revelations of character.

A more crucial problem is the absence of any dramatic momentum, as "The Showman" charts Bruscon's disintegrating rapport with his family--of his son, he bleats, "I wanted a genius; all I got was a nice person"--alongside rehearsals of the mock-historical epic he will be performing, "The Wheel of History." (The play-within-a-play, as we see it, brings together Metternich, Hitler, Lady Churchill and Nero, among others.) Director Jonathan Kent tries to reclaim the play but at most elicits a scant harrumph of pleasure in keeping with the full-throttle harrumphing taking place on stage.