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by George S. Kaufman & Moss Hart, directed by Edward Hall

National Theatre, Olivier Theatre

December 15, 2005-March 11, 2006

My second show at the National Theatre was ONCE IN A LIFETIME, a comedy from 1930 by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre.  I had missed the play somehow when the Shaw Festival in Ontario staged it in 1988 and remounted it in 1989.  Since the Festival seldom revisits plays by Shaw’s contemporaries, I thought I’d better not miss it again.  I was also curious to see David Suchet in a comedy. 

In the event the production was the least successful of the week.  The main problem with the show is the play itself.  The single point of its satire of the movie business is that Hollywood is run by idiots who waste bundles of money (no news there!).  Compared with other Kaufman plays like “You Can’t Take It With You” (1936) or “The Man Who Came to Dinner” (1939), the dialogue is punchy but without ever being witty or clever. 

Edward Hall’s huge-scale production, complete with live music, film excerpts and interpolated song and dance numbers, only underscores the flimsiness of the story and lameness of the dialogue.  The magnificent two-storey Art Deco staircase of the Hotel Stilton that spirals upwards from the revolve is a showstopper in itself.  It’s too bad nothing that happens on it matches its grandeur and whimsy.

Luckily the show is anchored by three fine performances.  Victoria Hamilton as Mary Daniels, a former vaudevillian who overnight becomes an elocution teacher for silent movie stars, brings real charm to the role and makes her the only character you really care about.  Adrian Scarborough, as George Lewis, an unworldly, wide-eyed innocent whose very dim-wittedness leads to his rise in Hollywood, makes George believable by playing him absolutely straight. 

David Suchet was perfect as the powerful movie mogul Herman Glogauer, rather like a comic, blustering version the Augustus Melmotte he played in “The Way We Live Now” but without the cunning underneath.  Suchet and Issy van Randwyck in the smaller role as Hollywood’s premiere gossip columnist Helen Hobart were the only two in the show who seemed able to make Kaufman’s dialogue work.  In contrast Serena Evans as Glogauer’s clueless secretary and Tim McMullan as a monomaniacal Erich Von Stroheim-like director didn’t seem to have much of an idea what to do with their parts. 

Kaufman’s comedies tend to pile improbability on improbability until they end in wild comedic chaos.  This is exactly what happens in “Once in a Lifetime”, but Hall’s unenergetic pacing and pleasant though unnecessary interpolations means we didn’t get the full power of an increasing build-up and bang that a less grandiose production might have provided.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in the London Theatre Guide 2006-01-31.

Photo: Adrian Scarborough, David Suchet and Victoria Hamilton. ©2005 Tristam Kenton.