THE GUARDIAN  (UK)

May 11, 2005

The Philadelphia Story
*** (3 stars out of 5 stars) Old Vic, London
by Michael Billington
The Guardian


Kevin Spacey's first Old Vic season ends better than it began with a decent enough revival of Philip Barry's urbane 1939 Broadway comedy. But I still feel the Old Vic deserves bigger, bolder, more exciting fare: perhaps we shall get it next season with Trevor Nunn directing Spacey in Richard II.

For the moment Barry's play is amiable, butter-bland stuff. It concerns, as all moviegoers will recall, the moral education of Tracy Lord: a wealthy Philadelphia heiress who has brains, beauty but a shocking intolerance of human weakness. On the eve of her second marriage to a mining magnate, she is condemned by her first husband as a "virgin goddess" and by her father as "a prig and a perennial spinster". Only after she has got wildly squiffy with an intrusive, infatuated journalist does she confront her own frailty and revise her plans.

What gives the play its curiosity value is Barry's equivocal attitude to the rich: having started out by satirising them, he ends up adoring them. His most telling point is that 1930s America was full of iron maidens such as Tracy who promised but never delivered: when Spacey, playing Tracy's first husband, waspishly said of their marriage "it was an affair of the spirit, not the flesh" it even struck me it had never been fully consummated. But Barry's attack on America's Tracys soon
turns into an embossed Valentine to the rich in which anyone who questions their privileges is instantly deemed a snob.

In truth, Barry's play lives or falls by the casting of Tracy herself; and rarely in history can there have been a part so immaculately tailored to its original actor. The critic George Jean Nathan claimed Barry spent two months with Katharine Hepburn, "noting carefully every attractive gesture she made, every awkwardly graceful movement of her body, every little odd quirk of her head and every effective dart of her eyes". No wonder the role on stage and screen fitted her like a glove: it had been manufactured to meet her body language and metallic persona.

Wisely, Jennifer Ehle makes no attempt to impersonate Hepburn; and she is very good in the early scenes at capturing both Tracy's lordliness and starched sexiness. She also conveys Tracy's pain at being cruelly told by her scapegrace father that what she lacks is "an understanding heart". But, although Ehle has Tracy's moneyed style, I missed the melting eroticism of the scene where she drunkenly unbends with the adoring journalist: Jerry Zaks' fastidious production never quite captures the sense that we are seeing a new, more emotionally generous woman.

As with National Anthems, the chief acting pleasure lies in watching Spacey himself at work. As CK Dexter Haven, Tracy's first, still unsatisfied husband, Spacey constantly reminded me of Jack Benny: there is the same dapper precision, mocking smile and immaculate comic timing. When Tracy's pompous groom says, "I've got eyes and imagination, haven't I?", Spacey gives him exactly the same long, hard stare that Benny used to reserve for the band that would interrupt him in mid-joke. There is also a hint of the mischievous Machiavel about Spacey's performance that for me lifted the whole evening.

For the rest we have a mixed Anglo-American cast that uneasily straddles two continents. DW Moffett, an authentic American, plays the intrusive, working-class journalist with a dull, rock-jawed solidity. On the other hand, Nicholas Le Prevost is lewdly funny as the bottom-pinching Uncle Willie but is as defiantly English as cheddar cheese. One of the best performances, however, comes from Lauren Ward, who endows the journalist's photographer chum with a watchful acerbity that reminded me of Hollywood's Eve Arden.

It is, in short, a mixed evening. It looks pretty enough in John Lee Beatty's designs and passes two and a half hours perfectly pleasantly. But there are many better American plays demanding revival: how about a look at early O'Neill, Odets or Rice? And, in the age of the video, one can't help making invidious comparisons with the George Cukor movie. Having entertained us sufficiently, I just hope Spacey remembers in his next season that he who dares wins.

The Philadelphia Story (The Guardian)

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

~

THE TIMES  (UK)

May 11, 2005

The Philadelphia Story
*** (3 stars out of 5 stars)
by Benedict Nightingale at The Old Vic, SE1


STRANGE to see the Old Vic curtain rising on butlers butling, footmen footing and maids daintily dusting furniture for characters who think South Bend as quaint a place name as our Bognor Regis or Herne Bay.

Kevin Spacey has staged some surprising things since he became the famous old theatre's artistic director last autumn — a poor Dutch play about the male menopause, a dull American piece about consumerist suburbia — but none more so than Philip Barry's counterpart of what Kenneth Tynan called the Loamshire comedy.

That's a genre whose characters "belong to a social class derived partly from romantic novels and partly from the playwright's vision of the leisured life he'll lead after the play is a success" — and, added Tynan, it is of no more use to a student of life than a doll's house to a student of town planning.

Oh well. The play's main message, that we should be more tolerant of the privileged, may seem dated in post-Thatcher Britain; but, as those who have seen the film by the same name or the musical version that called itself High Society, The Philadelphia Story is far more fun than the plays that have preceded it. And with Jennifer Ehle shining in the part Barry wrote for Katherine Hepburn in 1939, and Spacey himself at his most debonaire in the role played by Cary Grant onscreen, it's sure to bring the crowds to the Waterloo Road.

The setting is a mansion near Haverford, Bryn Mawr or some other Welsh-sounding burgh in the posh exurbia Philadelphians call the Main Line. Ehle's Tracy Lord is about to make a second marriage to a self-made magnate, and the signs aren't promising. Her first husband, Spacey's Dexter Haven, turns up and says rude things about her priggishness. Oliver Cotton as her father, who has been canoodling with a mistress in New York, follows suit. And the wedding party is invaded by a snooping journalist, D. W. Moffett's Mike, who makes it clear that, as a Jeffersonian democrat, he regards her and her family as spoiled leeches.

He must be (and is) quickly relieved of the chip on his shoulder, deciding she's "tremendous", and she must be (and is) relieved of the ice cubes in her heart. With the help of Moffett's adoring hack, Spacey as the cool, relaxed Dexter, and Talulah Riley as her annoyingly precocious little sister, Tracy takes enough unaccustomed booze to thaw herself and appal her pompous fiancé, giving us a mini-scandal and a fairy-tale ending.

Jerry Zaks's production is fluent enough, but can't hide the fact that Barry makes too little of his most promising comic situation, the pretence to the intrusive journo that Tracy's bottom-pinching uncle is actually her father; but then it's not well motivated in the first place. Julia McKenzie, Nicholas Le Prevost and others add lustre to the evening, but only Ehle is truly excellent. Whatever the cavils, she's an
Artemis with a bit of Amazon in her heart — and, it emerges, a touch of Dionysus in her soul.

The Philadelphia Story (The Times)

Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.

© 2000 - 2005 Driving Mr. Spacey!