Sunny spells brighten comedy

NOT so sunny . . . it’s back to bickering for Al (David Fielder, left) and Willy (Robert Pickavance) in the Coliseum’s production of The Sunshine Boys

The Sunshine Boys, Oldham Coliseum
ONE of the most difficult tricks in acting is to age successfully.

Few have managed it convincingly. Even the great Walter Matthau, in his fifties when he appeared as Willy Clark in the 1975 movie of this Neil Simon play, was unsuccessfully aged-up to play a 70-something former vaudevillian.

While his sense of comic timing and underlying warmth saved him, it was notably the 80-year-old genuine former vaudevillian, George Burns, who walked off with the Oscar as Al Lewis.

Neil Simon’s plays also require strong casts with personal warmth: most appropriately of Jewish actors. Simon writes in a style not exclusive to, but certainly strongly based on, the comedy stars around when he started in the business, and his dialogue — often funny, sometime sad — is best-delivered by actors steeped in the same tradition.
Neither of these factors, sadly, comes much into play in Joyce Branagh’s current production at the Coliseum. And while the lines are often as hilarious and as full of pathos as they were when they were written, they are delivered in an unbalanced partnership.

In David Fielder, the show has a sympathetic Al, whose lines are delivered in a realistic, human and thus funny way with all the underlying warmth of a doting grandfather, despite his lack of age.

But for all his hard work, Robert Pickavance doesn’t convince as Willy Clark. Not so much aged-up as turned into the sort of character you might see as the sleazeball informant in a New York cop drama, his put-downs and one-liners have little warmth, funny though they often are.

The set-up should be familiar to most, of course: long-forgotten double-act Clark and Lewis are recalled to brief fame to recreate one of their famous sketches for a TV tribute. The trouble is they hate each other, the minor grievances of a 43-year collaboration having grown into a chasm with no common ground. Their chief pursuit is bickering.

The highlight of a slightly slow-paced show is meant to be the rerun of the pair’s famous doctor sketch, which by and large works well — though quite why Clark performs like a third-rate Groucho Marx is a puzzle.

Among the supporting cast, Dominic Gately plays with great sympathy the nephew and agent Clark really doesn’t deserve.

The show is good to look at, too, with a broken old proscenium pasted over with old pages from “Variety”, and a beautifully distressed apartment for the main action.

So it’s mostly sunny, but with some dull patches.