Stage review: The Country Girl, Apollo

Jenny Seagrove ain't nobody's Country Girl but, aside from that gulf between title and player, everything else is flawless in Rufus Norris' nourishing re-working of Clifford Odet's alcohol-infused back-stage drama.

Statuesque Seagrove is Georgie Elgin and she plays to her strengths - a cut-glass, cold fish with melancholy in her eyes and weariness in her stance.

She is yielding only in her seasoned approach to sozzled hubbie Frank (Martin Shaw) who is living his life inside out, wondering if acting greatness can be his again or whether he is irretrievably a has-been toddler capable of nothing more than self-destruction and humiliation.

Georgie takes the cruel torments of Frank and the vitriol of director Bernie Dodd (Mark Letheren) with a stoicism that is her only defence against the stark climate changes of her husband's emotional cloudscape.

She is a stalagmite, harsh yet brittle, hidden away, with strength accrued through endurance, and likely to snap with the right leverage. She envisages Frank's possible success and failure with equal dread but knows, like any mother, she can only stand by and watch.

This is a powerful actors' piece. Martin Shaw sticks his head in a vast chocolate cake of possibilities and gorges on the rich confection he finds there.

One minute his compelling ego lights the room but a moment later he's sobbing, self-pitying, disgusting, infantilised. Sporting a phlegmy cough, necessary for the part, Shaw goes through the gears with lubricated aplomb - physical clowning mixed with velvet-voiced bombast topped with howling despair.

Letheren is brilliant. Reminiscent of tough-talking Mark Wahlberg in The Departed, he champions Frank's return against what he sees as Georgie's cold manipulation - but he's no deluded sentimentalist and the capacity of Frank to let anyone down at a moment's notice puts the director - and all those about him - on tenterhooks as first night approaches.

Director Norris has steeped the play in the theatre. The changing of the beautifully-lit sets (by Scott Pask, lighting by Mark Howett) becomes part of the play with cheery stage hands lobbing commands as they push furniture to and fro.

Stage manager Larry (Peter Harding) has a neat line in banter - "tonight we are not at home to Mr Sloppy" - which also bustles the play along.

On the wall of the Apollo, there's a poster for The Country Girl. But this one was 30 years ago and it was Martin Shaw playing the director Bernie. He may have been waiting three decades to get his hands on Frank and his uncorked relish is now delightfully on show in every cough, gesture, tumble and slurp.

A true West End event.

– From October 2010