The Times  (London)

March 26, 1997

Out of the jungle into the park

David Rabe's fine play defies a bomb scare

'Hurlyburly'

by Benedict Nightingale

Was the curse of Macbeth responsible? After all, David Rabe says in a wild, woolly programme-note that he took the title of his wonderfully wild if sometimes woolly portrait of the Californian drink, drug and divorce set from Shakespeare's most chilling opening scene. One witch tells the others she will meet them "when the hurlyburly's done, when the battle's lost and won", adding that the rendezvous will be "the heath". Well, a bomb-scare meant that the audience ended up banished from the Old Vic and gathered round a bench and a tree opposite the theatre. Hurlyburly was finally done, not on a heath, but in a tiny, grotty park normally occupied by winos.

It was impossible not to admire the resilience of Rupert Graves, Susannah Doyle and Daniel Craig as they defied the din of the traffic and ensured that we who were standing or kneeling round them did not miss Rabe's sad, funny denouement. But then the play would be worth attention if it had been relegated to the bottom of a plague-pit in Mortlake. It has its implausibilities and pretensions, but it is still hard to understand why so energetic a piece has taken 13 years to cross the Atlantic.

Rabe's best-known plays ­ Sticks and Bones, Streamers, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel ­ involve the human disasters caused by Vietnam. Hurlyburly is different, yet not wholly different. Its portrait of sleazy-smart California leaves you feeling you have been parachuted into a subtropical war zone variously populated by the lost, frightened, callous, angry, vicious and reptilian. Its people are members of the movie subculture, and usually high on something, whether it is coke, booze, sex, psychobabble, narcissism, misogyny or paranoia. They inhabit the Hollywood jungle, and the Hollywood jungle inhabits them.

In so far as there is a plot, it involves Graves's Eddie, a casting director, and Andy Serkis's Phil, the troubled ex-con he tantalises with promises of movie roles. It is hard to believe that two such different men would share the time of day, let alone long chats and, it seems, the odd woman; but maybe that is Rabe's point. Eddie is adrift in the Californian shallows and threw away his moral compass ages ago. It amuses and vaguely reassures him to collect people: the runaway girl a chum brings home as a sexual "care package"; the tart he watched performing fellatio on a film star in front of her child; Phil, behind whose tattoos seethes a murderous temper.

Does Rabe convince us that somewhere inside Eddie is a serious man appalled by the neutron bomb, political corruption and the frivolity of TV and film? Not really. But he has written a role that the excellent Graves invests with a nice mix of scorn, ennui and fastidious self-absorption. Indeed, Wilson Milam's cast is as strong as I recall Walken, Keitel, Ivey, Weaver and William Hurt being in 1984. Serkis brilliantly catches Phil's baffled violence; Stephen Dillane and Daniel Craig bring Eddie's friends to shrugging, sneering life; and, though the men's roles are bigger and better than the women's, Elizabeth McGovern finds emotional need as well as brittleness in his girlfriend. They all deserved the standing ovation they received in that funny little park. They had served the play and the theatrical gods well.

Books