Theatre

Park Avenue Cat

John Underwood | Friday 22 July, 2011 13:44

Glen Walford, who is perhaps best known for directing the original production of Willy Russell’s Shirley Valentine (as well as last year’s London production starring Meera Syal), returns to the West End stage with Park Avenue Cat, a play described as “a sexy new comedy to make you purr”. It’s a shame cats don’t make any noises which can be conveniently mashed into an onomatopoeic equivalent of ‘wince’, isn’t it?

Lily (Josafina Gabrielle) has a dilemma. She’s booked a session of couples’ therapy with borderline-unhinged analyst Nancy (Tessa Peake-Jones), but her erstwhile boyfriend Philip (Gray O’Brien) is nowhere to be seen – that is, at least, until he bursts into Nancy’s office halfway through what has turned into a rather emotional consultation. Or has he? You see, there’s more than one man in Lily’s life – she and Philip have been on a break, and she may have accidentally reopened negotiations with wealthy and charismatic ex-flame Dorian (Daniel Weyman) in the meantime. Couples’ therapy is complicated enough when there are only two people involved…

Park Avenue Cat is inexplicably (given that the titular epithet, which is constantly name-checked by all the characters, is obviously a reference to NYC) set in Los Angeles – not that you’d know from anything except the programme. As far as the audience is aware, the four characters exist solely in a rarefied atmosphere of cocktail bars, Japanese restaurants and therapists’ consulting rooms, which flit past each other with scant justification other than as an excuse to show off designer Mark Walters’ absurdly overcomplicated (and frequently wobbly) swivelling set. After a scene or two, however, you may come to consider the three minute scene changes a welcome relief from the excruciating tedium of the show itself.

This is a play with nothing to say and no way to say it – God knows the ‘unconventional sexual politics’ motif has had more than its fair share of stage time, and churning out another ‘Men are from [insert planet that likes no-strings sex] and women are from [insert planet that DESPERATELY NEEDS BABIES]’ play is a pretty risky thing to do unless you’ve got something genuinely new to add to the discussion. Playwright Frank Stausser’s dated and uninspired observations fall, alas, as flat as his jokes; one can’t escape the conclusion that the two unnecessary fight scenes were written in to give both the actors and the audience something to distract them from the script.

The characters are uniformly unsympathetic – each seems to have been kitted out with top of the range ‘kooky’ and ‘earnest’ dispensers, which are carefully adjusted to make sure that each scene has the requisite quantity of inane psychobabble and head-spinning melodrama. Desperate forty-something Lily heaves panto sobs and screeches about just how much she wants a baby, fiery and negligent Philip effs and blinds with reckless abandon, overwrought Nancy minces around like the Penguin whilst apparently getting off on her clients’ shows of affection and Dorian is utterly, incoherently, frothingly fucking crackers.

Generally speaking the actors do their best, but the clunky script and painfully elaborate stage directions leave them with few opportunities to do anything but shout, swoon or otherwise biff about like characters in a third rate soap opera. Weyman is obviously having the most fun with extravagant playboy Dorian (a performance which, depressingly, seems to owe a lot to Russell Brand’s recent film roles as a carbon copy series of rich idiots), whilst Peake-Jones’ performance could probably have been picked up wholesale from a builders’ merchant – a nice pine plank would, at least, have had a less erratic American accent.

I’m honestly at a loss to explain how a director with as impressive a pedigree as Glen Walford has got involved with such unremitting dross; or, in fact, how Park Avenue Cat has ended up on a London stage at all. From the first scene (Nancy listening to voicemails from her clients, because mental imbalance obviously = hilarity) to the stultifying ‘twist’ ending, this is a wasted hour and a half for all involved – cast, crew and audience alike. No wonder there’s no bloody interval; I can’t have been the only person who would have scarpered.

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