LONDON â€" Kim Cattrall has one great movie-star moment toward the end of “Sweet Bird of Youth†at the Old Vic Theater. Before that moment it arrived, I was worried that there would be nothing worth remembering from Marianne Elliott’s turgid revival of Tennessee Williams’s overwrought 1959 play about time as an assassin of the young and beautiful. So, thank you, Ms. Cattrall and Ms. Elliott, for salving my disappointment - at one of my final shows on this trip to London â€" at the last minute with this single image, fit for Cinemascope-sized recollection.
This is what happens: Ms. Cattrall, portraying the has-been, self-medicating film goddess Alexandra Del Lago, has been stumbling around a hotel room in a panic, hell bent on getting out of the unfriendly Florida town where she has washed up. Suddenly, someone’s battering on her door. It’s a gang of white supremacist rednecks, who have come to castrate her pet stud!
And Alexandra, bless her gold-plated heart, pulls herself together before you can say, “Roll ‘em.†She throws a mink stole over her now squared shoulders, straightens her back and faces down the thugs like Davy Crockett at the Alamo. Her instinctively grand posture suggests years of red-carpet appearances and confrontations with domineering studio heads; she’s valiant, pathetic, intimidating and absurd.
This is surely just what a survivor of the old Hollywood studio system would do when faced with a life-threatening crisis. When those castrating baddies burst into Alexandra’s room and froze in their tracks, I couldn’t help thinking (god forgive me) of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in “Mommie Dearest,†telling a board room of Pepsi Cola executives not to mess with her, fellas; this wasn’t her first time at the rodeo.
Otherwise, watching Ms. Cattrall in this production, which features the fresh-faced Seth Numrich as the gigolo Chance Wayne, I thought mostly of Susan Hayward. This is not just because Ms. Cattrall wears that red Haywardesque wig, which has been the subject of much sport in the London newspapers. Ms. Cattrall is also acting in the style of Hayward when that old-school star had her eyes on an Oscar nomination and was striving for high sincerity.
Best known for television’s “Sex and the City†but a deft stage veteran as well, Ms. Cattrall makes all the right histrionic gestures here, but they mostly feel hollow.She gives a carefully measured performance in which you’re always aware of the actress playing the actress. I might have enjoyed her more if I hadn’t seen Diane Lane’s searing Alexandra at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last year.
Ms. Lane’s gasping, grasping portrait unmistakably belonged to that gallery of creatures Williams identified as monsters, people made grotesque by success and humiliation, and a tribe to which he admitted he too belonged. Monsters are scary, partly because you’re afraid you might become one yourself given the right provocation. Ms. Cattrall didn’t scare me for a second.
Nor did Mr. Numrich â€" who played opposite another larger-than-life figure in the Broadway production of “War Horse†(co-directed by Ms. Elliott) - as Chance, a baby monster about to self-destruct. He’s a fine, sensitive and very likable actor. But in the role of a professional beauty who discovers his youth has evaporated, Mr. Numrich doesn’t look even remotely shopworn. This Chance is just a nice kid who can’t hold his liquor.
Remove the monstrosity from Alexandra and Chance, and you also remove the potential for “Sweet Bird†to be a tragedy as well as a melodrama. What’s left, then, is a lot of hokum about evil-minded Southern power-mongers and their minions. And it’s the vengeful, racist Boss Finley (played quite credibly by the Irish actor Owen Roe) who by default becomes this production’s monster supremo. Ms. Elliott and her technical team whip up a lot of rumbling, sinister atmospherics for “Sweet Bird,†but somehow the air remains inert.
Thunder and lightning - of the variety associated with generic dark and stormy nights - figure in “Bracken Moor,†Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play at the Tricycle Theater. Staged with absorbing conviction by Polly Teale, “Bracken Moor†is a ghost story with an earnest social conscience.
That combination of form and content isn’t as unusual as you might think. Isn’t that essentially what Dickens’s “Christmas Carol†is? In this case, the urges to terrify and moralize ultimately work against each other in this Great Depression-era tale of a coal-mining czar haunted by the death of his young son.
But until it reveals the political machinery behind the illusions, “Bracken Moor†is good fun in an old-fashioned way. It has some of the appeal of those early 20th-century Gothic tales by M.R. James (not Henry James, who aimed higher in his haunted house stories). Especially in its first act, in which visitors to a somber mansion in Northern England stir up things that go bump in the night, “Bracken Moor†smoothly melds shivery sensationalism with Shavian talkiness.
Ms. Teale is the artistic director of Shared Experience, which is known for translating classic novels into story theater, and her respect for traditional narrative serves “Bracken Moor†well. This is not a show to be winked at.
Mr. Campbell, whose previous works include the gay social-studies play “The Pride†and the family psychodrama “Apologia,†is a dramatist of admirably aspirational reach. But he needs to unfurrow his didactic brow a bit, and let the audience figure out on its own what he’s trying to say.
Great ghost stories, like Henry James’s “Turn of the Screw,†leave room for the individual imagination to fill in the blanks. “Bracken Moor†may end in darkness, with a last-minute “gotcha†reversal. But by that time it’s been flooded with so much instructional light that all shadows have long since been dissolved.
