Review - Dimetos, The Donmar

"Two glasses of wine, please?"

"Would you like anything for the interval?" said our favourite barman at the Donmar, "Because I would recommend buying a bottle of wine now, beforehand, having a couple of glasses, leaving it with me and finishing it off later. It works out cheaper."

But we'd read the reviews.

"Do you think we will be here for the interval?" I said. There was a pause.

"Two glasses of wine, then. White or red?"

Michael Grandage has followed up the trauma of Madame de Sade, still dragging it's way through a sold-out run at The Wyndhams, with a 1975 Athol Fugard four hander about "guilt, desire, betrayal and vengence", come on Mike have a heart, give us tune! Actually that's beginning to be an accurate summing up of my relationship with the Silver-Fox re. our theatre trips, I'm feeling guilty, he's feeling betrayed. I have desire to find something we can both enjoy and he's going to wreck his vengence if he doesn't have a laugh this side of the Oliviers.

Anywho, Dimetos/Jonathan Pryce, a brilliant engineer, has retreated from society and lives in a remote beach hut (lovely ropework and wooden mezzanine flooring by Bunny Christie, seaside lighting by Ben Ormerod) with nubile teenage niece, Lydia/Holliday Grainger, and faithful family retainer Sophia/ Victoria Wood favourite Anne Reid. They all seem perfectly happy with the arrangement, though nobody mentions that Lydia, as pointed out by the S-F, squeaks like Blackadder's Queenie, until Danilo/Alex Lanipekun turns up from the city (by way of Wig Out at The Royal Court, never thought I could be bored by drag) to request the great man's help in solving a tricky plumbing problem back in the big smoke. His appearance reveals the true level of Dimetos' discontent, and his real and frankly not very avuncular feelings towards his niece. A drunken fumble between Danilo and Lydia, is spied on by Dimetos who chooses to watch rather than intevene. On learning this Lydia takes the only path possible and grabs a handy rope, ties one of those useful knots learned at her uncle's knee and hangs herself. Oh that it were that easy for the rest of us.

At the interval we headed straight for our friend behind the bar, "If you stay Jonathan Pryce will do great hand acting, and the second half's only 35 minutes long?" "Two more glasses then and let no one say we shirked a challenge!"

35 minutes later we got our laugh, as the polite applause died away and the cast had barely left the stage a helpful usher boomed out."The quickest way to leave the theatre is by the side exit, this way!"

In the second half we'd watched Sophia confess her unrequited love for her employer and then Jonathan Pryce doing some wonderful descending-into-madness acting, using useful household implements and assorted stones in an attempt to stop and reverse time, a goal not shared by the audience I'll be bound. He's a marvel that man, the voice, the sticky up hair, the juggling hands!Mesmeric. He also wore a very natty dark-blue, brushed-cotton ensemble which I think would bring out the green in the eyes of the S-F....a call will be made to wardrobe.

Was it about the artist's responsibilty to honour his gifts, the need to engage in the world politically and socially? The neccessity for young women to keep their clothes on in front of close family members? Or was it all about the director Douglas Hodges' need, after spending virtually a year of his life in sequins and high heels in La Cage Aux Folles, to produce an antedote to simple entertainment? Got me. What ever, to quote Jack Lemon in Some Like It Hot, "Nobody talks like that!"

Btw, horses as critics. Discuss.

This piece opened with the partially clad Lydia and her knot-obsessed uncle rescuing a horse that had fallen down a well, while Sam Shepherd's monologue Kicking A Dead Horse seen at The Almeida last year ended with the dead animal rolling into a hole on top of Stephen Rea and stopping his self indugent middle aged angst mid flow. They're brighter than we think.