Theatre N16 4 – 14 April. Reviewed by Claire Roderick
I fear I’ve become a jaded old lady.
When John Patrick Shanley wrote the play in the 1980s, this may well have been a hard hitting piece. But since then, every writer wanting to be taken seriously has churned out something about two “broken characters finding redemption in each other”. It may be that I have seen far too many of those plays and films, or watched an unhealthy amount of Jerry Springer whilst at uni, to see two Americans provoking, shouting at or fighting with each other and actually care about them.
Danny is a violent thug called the Beast by his workmates, who only finds peace when he’s beating the living daylights out of someone, and Roberta is a divorced mother living with her parents and hiding her “crime”. Neither thinks they deserve happiness or love, and then they spend the night together.
The Apache Dance sequence of violence and sex is interesting, but the most successful scenes show the fanciful couple planning their wedding. Shanley writes much better tender scenes than violence, and the cast excels in the moments of gentle sweetness. Danny’s outbursts are petulant and pathetic rather than intimidating, and become predictable, with each incident better signposted than most London roundabouts. Gareth O’Connor gives his all in the role, as does Megan Lloyd-Jones as Roberta, but the characters are written as if Shanley wanted to include as many audition pieces for young actors as he could in one play. It’s just too much self-absorbed angst that makes the characters irritating rather than sympathetic, and you switch off. I have been to this theatre many times, but this is the first time I have ended up counting the trains as they passed.