Rough Crossing
Tom Stoppard
@ Chichester Festival Theatre
Two famous but desperate playwrights are stuck on an ocean liner headed for New York, feverishly trying to rehearse their latest show before reaching land, and opening night. But they are constantly distracted by their delicate composer’s attempts to end it all, having overheard his lover confess her feelings to the leading man.
Did I mention how charming the set was, a rather fetching two-story 30’s Deco device from Colin Richmond, who is also responsible for the costumes, it got me through most of the first act but then when the first song of the much celebrated music from André Previn began things started sinking fast. There’s farce and then there’s this unexciting turgid nonsense.
It’s as if Stoppard put all the elements of a decent farce in a bag, weighted it down with some spare plot he found down the back of the sofa and then threw the whole thing overboard. He’s then cobbled together some smug smutty toffs, a cabin steward who needs keel hauling, an unlikely romantic back story and some theatrical in-jokes and meta writing finishing the whole thing off with a speech impediment that relies on sublime timing and machine-gunned witty banter.
It never really builds up the narrative tension or raw speed to ensure the friction between all the potential ‘hilarious’ elements ever rubs enough and catches fire. The second half just triples the words per minute to no discernible funny affect and even the dance numbers failed to entertain. It’s a play within a play, or so it pretends to be, in fact it’s a vacuous smugness within a yawn.
One wonders with a Stoppard play if he’s playing with the play whilst in the play and there’s certainly some promise of deconstructive shenanigans but then the whole thing just hits the buffers of unfunny cliché and rather than stop, it keeps on butting into it, time and time again.
An unfunny joke repeated ad infinitum never gets any funnier and no matter how hard some of the cast worked this daft nonsense wasn’t going to stay afloat. It’s a touring production, and I wondered if it was in its first week, which might – just – have given the whole thing some wriggle room, but when I checked it’s just come down from Windsor. So there’s no excuse for inflicting that on anyone, certainly not the ticket buying public.
We had a delightful drive down to Chichester and the salvation of the Festival theatre is the breathtakingly architecture of the place, it’s solace to wander out into the brisk late winter air with the majestic concrete buttresses of raw architectural fabric so beautifully lit and showing all the glory of its structural brilliance.
My attention wandered permanently off the unengaging performances and ran down the exposed concrete of the load bearing walls, and although I could wax lyrically for some paragraphs about the Brutalist beauty of this perfect model of Elizabethan thrust theatre wrought vast and uber-modern from architects, Phillip Powell and Hidalgo Moya, I’ll not.
Rough Crossing is at Chichester Festival Theatre until February 16.