STAGE
Prick Up Your Ears, Comedy Theatre
3/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Daniel Kramer's new telling of the life and death of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell features a insightful turn by Little Britain star Matt Lucas.
REVIEW
With Alan Bennett's screenplay making Stephen Frears' film and John Lahr's biography drawing on playwright Joe Orton's diaries, the question hangs - why another version of Prick Up Your Ears?
The answer, I guess, is Matt Lucas. A meeting between the playful, bald and camp Little Briton and the similarly attired (if more unstable) Kenneth Halliwell has less the appearance of a happy coincidence than an artistic inevitability.
For this reason alone, it seems, writer Simon Bent attempts a new, if blunted, take on the story of the co-dependent and ultimately fatal relationship between Halliwell and Orton.
Despite a jolly re-creation of their early vulgar playfulness, we all know where it's heading and we monitor Halliwell's leg-jerks, count his Nembutal intake and observe his sweaty perambulations like cod psychiatrists waiting for the moment he blows.
But up until that point this is a game of two halves. The undiscovered pair spend their days writing unpublished works, defacing library books and re-working Mrs Dale's Diary into grubby farce. In this enterprise, Halliwell is the cultured engine of invention, Orton the brusque and unformed mentee.
A spell in prison for the vandalism separates the two and sends their strained partnership on darker and different routes. Orton starts to work alone. He's harder, more focused, more dangerous, more talented. Halliwell, the martyr snob, the babyish brat, is a wreck, popping pills, agoraphobic and fearful of losing Orton.
Their spirit of bawdy excess lingers, though, in the form of landlady Mrs Corden, who pops in occasionally ("Only me!" she screeches). Sitcom staple Gwen Taylor is no stranger to the art of the coy glimpse, the deliberate pause and the ramrod punchline and her broad and lascivious housewife channels Irene Handl by way of Bennett.
Chris New takes Orton on the brisk journey from hedonistic outsider to Swinging Sixties totem with sinuous efficiency. His indulgence of the lachrymose Halliwell is all the more touching after his own heart has been hardened by the hot and cold of literary fortune.
Lucas draws on some rampant forces to bellow and gallop like the raging Halliwell. His performance, as chaos descends, is affecting and rich and there's no shortage of investment in his attempts to deliver the destructive demon dwelling within.
As he sinks further into his jealous rage, craving and loathing his partner, his collages grow up the walls like poison ivy, betraying a frantic and disjointed mind. Designer Peter McKintosh turns the small Islington flat into a fiendish Bedlam predicting the horror that follows.
By the final hammer strike, the cheeky star of Little Britain has been subsumed by something altogether more tangled and tortured. His final stillness, after so much agitation, is all the more disturbing.
The cast features high among the many plus-points of Daniel Kramer's production. But, ultimately, the evening falls just short of the operatic grandeur and forensic insight required to nail the tragedy of two people who forfeit all possible happiness to attend instead to the demeaning rituals of casual cruelty.
