A shockwave went through Broadway last year when a revival of Neil Simon’s 1963 comedy, Brighton Beach Memoirs, one of the New York writer’s best-loved and most often produced plays, closed within a week of opening.
In an era when musicals reign Simon’s witty and warm autobiographical portrait of a Jewish Brooklyn family struggling through the Depression is about as bankable as straight plays get. Yet the $3-million production, despite being well reviewed, still went belly up, making it one of the biggest flops in recent times.
It was because it did not have big names in the cast, said some observers. It was because it received the wrong kind of marketing, said others. Whatever the reason, the rules seemed to have changed. There was a time when Neil Simon, aka the King of Broadway, was the only name a play needed. Could it be that New York is turning its back on New York Jewish humour?
At a stretch, it is possible to imagine Watford being to London what Brooklyn is to Manhattan. At least, Simon’s play and Jennie Darnell’s terrifically paced and performed production seem right at home in this Edwardian theatre, which would not look out of place in Brooklyn itself.
Though take a tip and sit in the middle of the auditorium. Jonathan Fensom’s design of the Jerome household makes no concessions to the awful sight-lines from the aisle seats. It is a jigsaw set of upstairs and downstairs, inside and outside — a place packed to the rafters with the families of two sisters and their children, minus one deceased husband.
They are the kind of Jewish family whom, I have heard it said, gentiles find alarmingly, even exotically talkative. Everyone gets to reveal everything they ever felt, about each other, about themselves, and each has their own crisis.
Sixteen-year-old Nora (Sonya Cassidy) is desperate to be in a Broadway show, her cousin Stanley (Ronan Raftery) has been fired for standing up for someone else’s rights, his father Jack (Stephen Boxer) is working himself into an early grave and his youngest son, 15-year-old Eugene, lusts inappropriately after his cousin Nora’s body.
From the moment that Ryan Sampson’s nebbish Eugene introduces himself as narrator and his family’s self-appointed memoirist, it is pretty clear that Simon’s play is in safe hands. Sampson has done Jewish before. In a French play called Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Qur’an, he played a vulnerable Jewish boy who strikes up a friendship with an elderly Muslim man.
Here he delivers a pitch-perfect performance that transmits Eugene’s neurotic intelligence with (a tad too much) nose scratching and just the right amount of adolescent self-loathing. There are, it is true, shades of Woody Allen, but Sampson has the charisma to make the role his own.
Tessa Churchard as Eugene’s mother is also on fine form with a performance that could so easily have put too much Yiddishe into the role of mother.
Director Darnell has come up with a production that does justice to Simon, and hits the rhythms of both speech and comedy with unerring accuracy. The evening is as rewarding and enjoyable as any to be found in London. Though if producers go by what happened on Broadway, do not expect a West End transfer.
