There’s no doubt that Eileen Atkins is playing a character loosely modelled on Germaine Greer in Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species at the Vaudeville, though why Greer should be so touchy about it is beyond me.

Dubbing Murray-Smith an insane reactionary — though she has neither read nor seen the play — Greer suggests the piece might be worth a production in Auckland, New Zealand, not the West End.

Maybe, but then we’d be denied the pleasure of Dame Eileen protesting that Margot Mason, the alliterative GG clone, is not a life coach, but a provocateur and responding, in true GG style, that her sleek French windows are French “because they’re thin, stylish and up themselves.”
 
Greer knows a bit about drama, and shouldn’t be surprised that characters in modern plays from Bernard Shaw to Alan Bennett are often — if not, indeed, always — modelled on real-life and contemporary public figures.  Even Atkins herself has written an impressive  theatrical study of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. 

So what’s the problem? If anything, Atkins makes the idea of Greer more agreeable than ever and offsets the grumpy old woman stridency that has lately marred her usually intelligent public pronouncements (I except here, of course, her amazingly dim and often uninformed comments — especially on theatre — on BBC TV’s Late Night Review).

The play opened to a packed out first night crowd that included Corin Redgrave on his sixty-ninth birthday, Ben Brantley still blogging away for the New York Times on an extended visit, director Richard Eyre, and two of our finest unsung leading actors, Graham Seed of The Archers and Nicholas LePrevost, recently Uncle Vanya at the Rose.

Seed and LePrevost were enjoying a pre-show drink together in the Nell Gwynne bar next door. Seed’s just returned from a Greek island holiday with his partner, the agent Denise Silvey, and told me that the first person he bumped into in the hotel breakfast room was a devoted fan of his, and wearing a “The Archers” sun hat to prove it.

Was there no escape for the poor thespian, even on his holiday? Embarrassment was added to irritation when he and Denise had to touch the Archers fan for a sub; they’d run out of currency and all the cash machines had been vandalised.

LePrevost is another actor you’d expect to avoid the instant recognition factor. And indeed he does — except when he made a television advert years ago for Matchmakers chocolates. He couldn’t go into a pub, he now says, without a chatty barman preempting his order with a wink and a nudge and a “Nah, sorry mate, we don’t sell Matchmakers!”

Back inside the theatre, as we pushed and shoved our way to the stalls, it occurred to me that owners Nica Burns and Max Weitzenhoffer (the Nimax team) really need to employ a town-crier-like front of house manager with fascist tendencies to move people along more efficiently and dispel the gridlock in the foyer.

By the time we all got seated, about ten minutes after the curtain was due to rise, I felt positively guilty that I hadn’t returned my unused second ticket much earlier in order to feel more properly and claustrophobically wedged in.

This was a second Nimax opening in so many days, following Zorro at the Garrick. When I read Michael Billington failing to stop himself saying he looked back on Zorro not in anger, I blinked hard and thought, I’m zorro, I’ll read that again. At least I had the good grace not to write it.   

The Nimax double is unique for involving novelist Isabel Allende in both projects: she’s a co-producer of Zorro, very loosely based on her own wonderful novel; and there’s a tart exchange in The Female of the Species where Margot cattily refers to the mutual admiration quotes on the two writers’ dust jackets.

One thing’s for sure, though: Germaine Greer won’t be appearing on the advertising hoardings along the Strand, the silly moo. Atkins has succeeded in making her seem clever and funny and even vulnerable…as well as foul-mouthed and superficially arrogant…what more could she possibly ask for: a slice of the royalties, perhaps?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 9:29 am and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.