A rather dull day for the Sunshine Boys

THE SUNSHINE BOYS, Oldham Lyceum, by Paul Genty

NEIL SIMON has written hugely successful plays for many years, and this one needs much more careful attention than most.

The way that friends bicker and argue is a theme better developed in his earlier hit comedy “The Odd Couple” — unlike here, you get the distinct idea that the two men at its heart actually quite like each other.

Here Simon reverses the opposites-attract theme with former star Vaudeville comedy act Willie Clark and Al Lewis — who worked together for so long they grew to hate each other.

An amateur company like the Lyceum Players is always going to have trouble capturing the mixed emotions of the pair with any success: it requires gifted actors with natural warmth. You have to quite like them, despite what they say to each other. Matthau and Burns in the famous movie and Jack Klugman and Tony Randall, on stage, all had it. Which, you might quickly surmise, isn’t quite the case here.

The dialogue, with Simon’s trademark one-liners and comebacks, gets laughs, of course. But under these there is little to warm to.

Simon certainly doesn’t provide much help: Clark’s beef is that Lewis wanted to retire when his wife died, while he did not — and that Lewis had a couple of other minor quirks. In other words, Clark comes across as simply a miserable, selfish old man. Little that actor Mike Law does in playing him gives us any other idea: no mannerisms, no gestures, no looks — little to suggest Clark is a comedy legend under his surface veneer of sneer.

John Rhodes is more successful as Al Lewis, simply because he is less miserable and seems at least to be more generous than his counterpart. But there’s not a lot in it.

Only once in the evening is there the sense that these two characters might once have been great comedians, during the recreation of their most famous sketch for a TV retrospective. If director John Fletcher had managed to maintain this pace through the rest of the show, the evening would get many more laughs.

As it is, the warmth is left to the subsidiary players: particularly Matthew Allen as Clark’s long-suffering nephew and Lois Kelly as the nurse.