★★★☆☆
Three Stars
Steven Berkoff’s Dahling You Were Marvellous is a masterfully conceived play. Ceaselessly satirical, unnervingly pertinent, and entertainingly colourful, it presents a series of well-drawn caricatures, every one somehow connected with showbiz and every one glorious in their annoying, borderline aggravating, self-absorption. Cameron Cook’s production at the BT Studio is as bold as brass, as tight as a drum, and as energetic as a hyperactive toddler, but there is one major problem: comedically, it’s as hit and miss as a drunken divorcee desperately trying to reach the high notes of Harry Nilsson’s Without You from a Wetherspoons’ tabletop.
There are funny parts and there are not so funny parts; there are funny characters and not so funny characters. Nick Davies and Helena Wilson are entertaining, if a little tedious (though, one feels, that is kind of the point), as Steve and Linda, a pair of cross-legged, narcissistic sycophants, who are all-talk-and-no-action over their desire to take on the roles of Macbeth and his lady wife.
Actor/Director Cook is impressively, if not enjoyably, visceral (Ray Winston-esque) in his various loud-mouthed parts, though if he could develop just one alternative facial expression his performance would be immeasurably more watchable. Maintaining that grossly upturned lip and scrunched-up nose for the entire duration of the performance must be exhausting on the face.
Exaggerated physicality, grossly distorted facial expressions, and appropriate over-acting are all. Or rather, they are almost all. With his recognisable monosyllabic delivery, David Meredith manages to capture as much as the other performers and more, barely straining a muscle in the process.
There is something totally unique about Meredith’s brand of humour, a combination of quintessentially human pathos and crushing cynicism. He always seems so aware that he is on stage, yet this paradoxically lends an extra dimension to his comedy. Whether as the enunciating Sir Mike, the painfully alternative Sid, or the timid would-be-producer tentatively proffering his screenplays, he never fails to amuse. Come to that, he never fails to amuse in anything he turns his hand to.
“A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth,” said Joseph Conrad, and while this might seem an obvious observation, it is one Cook et al would do well to contemplate. Caricatures are only funny when the kernel of truth at their heart is defiantly present. With some of the characters presented in Dahling You Were Marvellous, it seems to be disappointingly absent.
Hence the audience laughs at Meredith’s Sid, because no matter how exaggerated his irritatingly shallow pretentious to social commentary are, they are the recognisable traits of the guardian-reading, herbal-tea-drinking quasi-anarchist. But conversely, the audience does not laugh (as much) at Nick Davies’ moronic Brick Bergman, because his bravado and naivety seem little more than a polished veneer.
Reception to these caricatures is undoubtedly subjective; we find those exaggerated stereotypes funny which we are most familiar with. So it is inappropriate to criticise any of the cast, for their satirical endeavours may resonate better with another audience member. If you’re a cardigan-wearing, skinny-jeaned Oxford arts student like me though, they quite probably will not.
That said, Dahling You Were Marvellous is far from unentertaining. Cook’s production is slick to the point of seamlessness and many of the characters presented really do find comedic purchase. It is an enjoyable, exhilarating hour of fun-poking, married only by its understandable inconsistency.
