I love Restoration comedies, so I was very happy to see this one announced at the National Theatre. Alex at his funniest and most outrageous. And, almost out of place, this rehearsal picture from the programme:
Michael Billington in the Guardian:
"But any revival depends on Lord Foppington, and this production gets a brilliant performance from Alex Jennings, who grasps the essential point that the character is both dressily effeminate and roguishly hetero. "I love to see myself all round," cries Foppington gazing into one of his endless mirrors. And Jennings takes us all round the character by showing him as a bumptious narcissist who completes everyone's sentences, and as an urban lech who makes a play for every pretty woman. It is the contradictions that make Foppington funny: my favourite moment comes when Jennings, in the midst of a swordfight with Loveless, pauses to observe "nice cuffs"."
Susannah Clapp in the Observer:
"There are several good reasons for going to the National Theatre at the moment. Most of them are actors. And one of these is Alex Jennings. Nearly always a lead, and never merely a star, Jennings has often appeared in pinched and pernickety roles, parts which didn't merely gain from but demanded the precision of his speech. After a time, his gimlet-eyed Angelo in Measure for Measure began to seem like typecasting.
Now he's been given his chance in Trevor Nunn's production of The Relapse to take full comic flight. And he's seized it triumphantly. As Lord Foppington, the beau who employs a page to carry his hankie, and whimpers 'my epaulette' when a duelling sword strikes his shoulder, Jennings is a many-tiered confection of plumes and furbelows, teetering on lilac high heels.
He looks like a wedding cake that has sprung into alarming, fruity life. He goes all round the character, sometimes striking the note of a latterday Malvolio, with his fixed, face-lifted gaiety and his lurking distemper. Enormously jealous of any vivacity that isn't his own, he constantly interrupts others by echoing their own words. His pursed-up mouth unleashes a range of blustering phrases - 'Split me windpipe', 'Stack me vitals' - as if they were surprises even to himself."
Benedict Nightingale in The Times:
"Here is a fop who is robbed of his bride by his brother and shoved into a putrid dog kennel by his putative father-in-law, Brian Blessed’s Tunbelly Clumsy, an over-the-top blend of Obelisk and a Yeti. Yet Jennings’s Foppington still manages to maintain not a little intelligence, a resilient wit, a wonderful complacency and a superb serenity in adversity. He knows that he’s the best that London society has to offer — and, yes, maybe he is."
Rhoda Koenig in the Independent:
"The play, however, belongs to Alex Jennings's Foppington, a drawling monument of camp ("My life is a perpetual stream of pleasure") who, swooning at his powdered and painted reflection, puts one in mind of Edith Sitwell blissfully entangled with Cyril Ritchard."
The production poster, a larger version of the programme cover, still has pride of place in my dining room!
More details and pictures at the AJ Archives.
"The Relapse" alternated with "The Winter's Tale", so I saw that a few days later. A very different piece, obviously, and a different side to Alex.
Benedict Nightingale in The Times:
"Let’s start with the best, which is Alex Jennings and the power of his pain. He shows us King Leontes’ craziness all right. He catches the terrifying sincerity of a man who has succumbed to terminal monomania, in this case the obsessive conviction that his wife Hermione is betraying him with his best friend Polixenes.
But from the start, when he’s haplessly comforting himself with his little son, you’re aware that his jealousy hurts him almost as much as he’ll hurt others. And that’s excellent underpinning, because it ensures that we always regard him not just as some ferociously mottled-faced Saddam but as a suffering human, one of us."
Michael Billington in The Guardian:
"By opting for modern dress, Hytner also anchors Leontes's jealousy in a plausible world of tortured politesse, and provides a perfect setting for a major performance from Alex Jennings as Leontes. What is startling about Jennings is the exact gradation of his decline. He starts as a modern, sweatered monarch tossing a rugby ball to his old chum, Polixenes, as if he were boy eternal.
Left to himself over coffee, he drums his fingers restlessly on an armchair and descends by rapid degrees into filthy-minded fantasist and raw-boned, red-faced paranoid convinced he is a derided cuckold. The upholstered smoothness of Ashley Martin-Davis's setting, with its elegantly sliding screens, somehow makes his insane jealousy all the more shocking.
What Jennings brings out as well as any Leontes I have seen is the depth of the character's shame. After the death of his son Mamillius, he rocks silently back and forth as if his top-heavy body were possessed by grief. When he says of Camillo, whom he has urged to poison Polixenes, "how he glisters through my rust", it is a cry of profound mortification. And, at the play's end, as Claire Skinner's marble-still Hermione is restored to life, Jennings mixes silent astonishment with a retrospective guilt. This is a fine performance that pierces straight to the heart."
More details and pictures at the AJ Archives.
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