Review: Prisoner of Second Avenue

The lankier half of the duo that gave London theatre its two most thrilling hours of the past decade is back.

Jeff Goldblum's performance with Kevin Spacey set the benchmark in this country for meeting the demands of modern American dialogue when they revived David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow a couple of years ago.

Here, Neil Simon's 1971 mid-life crisis comedy, in which Goldblum plays disillusioned advertising exec Mel Edison, may be lighter fare, but the rhythms and cadences of Simon's writing are no less demanding than Mamet's.

Cadence may not be the thing for which audiences queue at the box office, but as Walt Disney once said about the detail in his animation, you would notice if it was not there.

In Terry Johnson's production, it is there in spades, at least when the stage is shared by Goldblum and his fellow American Mercedes Ruehl, who is Mel's wife Edna. Together they play the music of New York neuroses like virtuoso musicians.

Set entirely in Mel and Edna's 14th-floor apartment on the Upper East Side, the play kicks off with Mel's giant kvetch delivered in his pyjamas at 2.30 in the morning. It is not just the freezing cold air conditioning, or the city heat that is keeping him awake, but the smell of garbage that wafts up to the balcony, the traffic noise, the toilet whose handle you have to jiggle to stop it flushing, the fact that food which used to keep you alive now gives you cancer - and, most of all, that he is 47 years old and does not know who he is or where he is going.

News bulletins put Mel's whinge in context. Crime is up, the city is bankrupt and even the judges are on strike. None of this feels as dated as it might sound. New York may have moved on since the 1970s but complaining has stayed the same.

Where the play begins to show its cracks is in how the couple deal with Mel getting fired and how this alpha-husband is emasculated by his wife getting a job. Kvetch turns into crisis.

It is as a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown that Goldblum - an actor who even at his calmest is never far from unhinged - expands into his role. He does not so much mope around the apartment as stalk. The nearer he gets to paranoia, the less control he has over his endless limbs. As he tells Edna of the "secret plot" to keep him out of work, there is a moment of extravagant gesticulation when the stalk becomes a moonwalk. Meanwhile, Ruehl's Edna provides the perfect grounded counterpoint, although she too can produce the neurotic goods when the role calls for it. In the hands of this duo, Simon's banter soars. But Johnson's production almost fatally misfires with the introduction of the British cast who play Mel's four concerned siblings.

As two of them, Linal Haft and Amanda Boxer are practically shoo-ins for New York characters of a Jewish kind. But while the accents are almost bang on, the comic delivery is of a much broader British kind which pauses before punchlines and loves the double-take. It is a subtlety of timing and delivery that is absent. As Disney said, you notice because it is not there.

The result is that while Goldblum fans will not be disappointed, Simon fans might. (www.vaudeville-theatre.co.uk)