Critical Comment for Jun 06
We critics talk endlessly about issues. Can Kevin Spacey turn the Old Vic around? Whither the National Theatre? Are there too many Hollywood stars in the West End? But we rarely talk about acting. Partly through pressure of space and time. But also because our theatre is no longer dominated, as it was in the 1940s and 50s, by heroic performers. The age of Olivier, Gielgud and Ashcroft is past. Now we talk of going to see “Trevor Nunn’s Hamlet” or “Sam Mendes’s Othello.”
So, for a change, I’d like to celebrate an actor: David Haig who, in the current revival of Michael Frayn’s Donkeys’ Years, is giving what I see as a career-defining performance. Haig has, of course, been around for some time always doing fine work. He was a vital part of the Royal Court under Max Stafford-Clark. He was the knee-trembling centrepiece of Terry Johnson’s Dead Funny. And for me he was much the best thing about Mary Poppins. As the employer of the starch-knickered nanny, there was an extraordinary moment when he returned home after losing his job and barked loudly at his brattish offspring. It was as if real life had suddenly intruded into the technicolour fantasy of the musical.
What Haig does in Donkeys’ Years is even more remarkable: he shows that farce is only funny when it grows out of observed truth. He plays a junior education minister who goes back to an Oxbridge gaudy and gets involved in sexual shenanigans with the Master’s wife: basically he is trying to conceal her compromising presence in his bedroom.
Post Prescott, the obvious temptation would be to play up the minister’s grotesque absurdity. But Haig scores an instant hit by making him a figure of impeccable rectitude. There’s something about Haig’s balding pate and trim tash that invokes Clem Attlee rather than our own Blairite Pooh Bahs.
What makes Haig’s performance so brilliant is that it’s a classic demonstration of decency destroyed. As Frayn’s play elides from comedy into farce and the minister is plunged into a living nightmare, so Haig’s own performance becomes more elaborately physical. At one point, stricken with crippling back pains, he does a low-slung, simian Max Wall waddle that had me in hysterics. Later, in his confusion, he aberrantly tries brushing his teeth with shaving-cream. But my favourite moment comes when a tell-tale red handbag is found in his possession. Picking it up gingerly between thumb and forefinger, Haig swings it nonchalantly over his left shoulder as if he were a practised tranvestite. Better, we infer, to be branded a cross-dresser than a serial adulterer.
If I dub the performance “career-defining”, it is because it elevates Haig into the select band of classic farceurs; and, if I had to find a parallel, it would be with the great Alec Guinness. Long ago – oddly enough in the same year as Look Back In Anger first appeared – Guinness appeared in a Feydeau farce called Hotel Paradiso. And, like Haig today, Guinness combined deceptive ordinariness with astonishing physical elasticity. At one point Guinness, as a cowering would-be adulterer informed that the police were looking for a very tall man, seemed to shrink inside his skin. But when the police insisted they were actually after a very small man, Guinness suddenly seemed to expand to someone of preposterous height. That’s acting.
But Haig’s performance also brings back memories of A Flea In Her Ear which was one of the earliest hits of Olivier’s National Theatre. This boasted two treasurable performances. One from Albert Finney as a wayward bourgeois who happened to be a dead ringer for a grinning hotel porter: Finney, of course, played both. But the other great performance came from Edward Hardwicke who, in a typically cruel Feydeauesque stroke, was an innocent young rake with a cleft palate. The production remained in the National repertory for years. But when Jacques Charon, who directed it, was asked the secret of playing farce he said it was “to be realistic within the style.” In other words, there has to be a core of truth within the jet-propelled velocity.
That seems to me the lesson that Haig, aided by director Jeremy Sams, has learned. You see a lot of coarse farce acting based simply on speed, energy and sweat. But it is not enough to rush around like a wound-up toy. Farce only transcends mechanical fun when you believe in the people. There’s a moment in Donkeys’ Years, for instance, when Haig’s character expresses horror at the sight of an off-duty porter in sweater and jeans. At that point Haig reminds us of the moralising tendency of all politicans and even leans on a chair-back as if were the despatch-box. Such moments of truth lay the basis for the character’s fall.
I don’t want to give the impression that Donkeys’ Years is a solo show. There is a whole slew of highly accomplished performances from such fine actors as Samantha Bond as the fatally myopic Master’s wife and Michael Simkins who shows a respected surgeon turning into a mad, syringe-wielding Frankenstein. But it is Haig who ushers us into the wilder reaches of lunacy. At a time of instant celebrity, it is a pleasure to salute an actor who has paid his dues. And, if I were a director looking for someone who could portray the mania lurking inside apparent normality, I would remember the wise words of the old whisky advertisement: “Don’t be vague, ask for Haig.”