During previews, Myrtle is shaken up even further when a 17-year-old superfan, Nancy (Shira Haas,) gets an autograph from her at the stage door and is then immediately run over and killed by a car. Everyone else cheerfully brushes the various bits of flying teeth off their clothes and rushes off to find a restaurant, but Myrtle isn't hungry, and everyone's like "what's the holdup, don't you want to get something to eat? Didn't the teenager's blood pooling on the pavement make you fancy some nice black pudding? Didn't the entrails hanging off the back of the car give you a hankering for haggis? Didn't the smear of blood on the camera that looked suspiciously like ketchup have you rushing off for a burger?" Needless to say Myrtle is the weirdo in this scenario.
Her colleagues' support extending as far as "Jesus Christ aren't you over it yet? It's been a whole 30 seconds since we watched a child get squished, I even warned you about that stray eyeball so you wouldn't step on it," Myrtle becomes haunted by visions of the dead girl, who's come to represent her own lost youth. Which I guess is a relief because it means her breakdown is all about her, and she's not actually been traumatised by the fact that someone will be power-washing bits of Nancy out of the tarmac all night. That would just be overly sensitive.
More importantly it's nearly time to invite the critics in, and Myrtle still doesn't understand her character, despite helpful advice from playwright Sarah (Nicola Hughes) like "this play is about ageing" and "OMG when will you realise this play isn't about ageing?" I don't know why it's a particular problem that Myrtle doesn't know what the play's about since nobody else does - Manny openly admits he doesn't know what he's doing, and the fact that at every rehearsal they seem to be discussing a different play suggests nobody else does either.
I guess maybe it would make a tiny bit more sense if there was some suggestion that everyone involved was desperate for the work and had had to grab a job they weren't convinced about, with this being a particularly pressured production that's not had enough time or money behind it, but the implication is that they're all at the top of their game and Sarah's play has them really excited (one of these days the director and cast might even get round to reading it,) and we're often reminded that David's pockets are essentially bottomless. I'm not sure we can even blame it on it being the seventies and them all being coked off their tits, or else why would Myrtle's relatively mild drinking problem be such a big issue?
The other reason you can't really blame the seventies is because this is van Hove so the design is the same as usual and firmly present-day, with cameras following everything and live projections on the back wall and around the theatre - Jan Versweyveld even seems to be reusing the All About Eve set. Like The Human Voice, Opening Night seems to be actively sabotaged by this adherence to the same aesthetic, as the stripped-back style means there's no real sense of the quirky or surreal to all the weirdness and discordancy of the story, and we're just left with incoherence.
It also means a lot of stuff is incredibly unclear, like whether a given scene from the play is meant to be a preview or a rehearsal: At one point Myrtle wanders off and leaves Gus (Jos Slovick) alone on stage because she's convinced Nancy's ghost is performing the scene in her place, and there's a big panic as Gus is left to improvise, suggesting there's a live audience there. Then when they finally get her back they start giving notes mid-scene so I guess it's a rehearsal? Honestly, I don't know anything about Cassavetes' or van Hove's rehearsal processes, but at one point Myrtle has a crisis about her character getting slapped, so Manny decides it's time to rehearse the slap scene, and teach the actors how to do a stage slap for the very first time. At this point they've been performing this scene in front of paying audiences for a couple of weeks, presumably Maurice has just been flailing his arms around in Myrtle's general direction and hoping for the best, no wonder she's worried.
Also unclear is whether Manny's wife Dorothee (Amy Lennox) is in any given scene or not; when her husband's gone to Myrtle's house in the middle of the night to give her performance tips and get off with her a bit, Dorothee's back at home soundtracking the scene with a song about how trees have thre answers to all her problems, but she doesn't speak tree so that's her buggered. I thought something similar was happening when she was at the side of the stage while Myrtle and Sarah had a conversation, but then halfway through she joins in so I guess she was just sitting there listening to them like any normal person. Dorothee's back story seems quite important to the show. I wonder what it is. Something about her having been an actress but now I assume she's a housewife, because there seems to be some significance to Manny repeatedly belittling Myrtle's character by describing her as "not even a housewife." I'm guessing the element of chauvinism was genuine in the seventies, it feels like a point is being made about it here. I also wonder what that is.
Wainwright's songs are a mix of surprisingly trad musical theatre numbers, grungy rock tracks and power ballads, and the cast delivers them well - Smith is more in emotional, voice cracking territory than big vocal powerhouse here. But the songs are just... there, as if van Hove doesn't quite know how to take music and theatre and put them together to make musical theatre. At one point things go a bit meta as Myrtle starts a mournful song and Sarah freaks out asking why she's started singing. And then almost immediately breaks into her own big belting showstopper. I'm sure Hughes is thrilled that van Hove's chosen to do this whole number with the cameras zoomed into an extreme closeup of her fillings. Opening Night has to at least be commended for trying to do something new with the genre. But it's not just that it does it badly, it didn't convince me that it knew what genre it was working with in the first place.
Opening Night by Ivo van Hove and Rufus Wainwright, based on the film by John Cassavetes, is booking until the 27th of July at the Gielgud Theatre.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Jan Versweyveld.
I thought the fan's name was Nancy and that's why she wrote that on the mirror... I may have misunderstood!
ReplyDeleteLook if I've just watched someone get turned into mince I can't be worrying about what they're called. I'm too busy being hungry.
Delete