The Lady from Dubuque

Who was that strange lady I saw you with last night? That was no eyesore, that was Maggie Smith; or, that was no lady, that was my mother; or, that was no ordinary lady, that was the lady from Dubuque.

Edward Albee’s bleak, sardonic comedy, which closed after a dozen performances on Broadway in 1980, is a bold choice of play in the West End even after all these years, and even with Dame Maggie as the chief attraction. For it is a spiky comedy about death written, almost like music, for eight voices; you might sub-title the piece “the arch Dubuque octet.”

Anthony Page’s brilliantly cast, superbly acted production – Dame Maggie does not take a solo call, but leads the line at the end – also removes a potentially intimidating air of mystery by playing the piece entirely for real, with no Gothic extravagance or self-consciousness.

The first act is a classic alcoholic shindig in the Albee land of Connecticut Yankees, magnificently designed (by Hildegard Bechtler) as an all-white, split-level modernist suburban palazzo, with four guests cutting each other with insults and badinage while the dying hostess, Jo (Catherine McCormack), and her fraught husband, Sam (Robert Sella), give back as good as they get.

The meekest guest, Edgar (Chris Larkin, Dame Maggie’s real-life elder son), is grateful, as he leaves, for yet another average, desperate sort of evening. When he returns because his wife Lucinda (Vivienne Benesch), Jo’s old college friend, is suffering a crisis on the lawn, he is asked what has he forgotten: his youth, or his dignity? There follows a macabre dialogue between Sam and Jo about life after her death from cancer; as Sam carries her upstairs in throes of agony, Jo pointedly remarks that it’s been easier to get her into bed before.

This sort of grim acidity is mother’s milk to Dame Maggie, of course, who arrives at the end of the first act accompanied by Oscar (Peter Francis James) a black former military officer with Japanese martial arts skills. The little old lady from Dubuque, Iowa, was imagined to be not the average metropolitan sophisticate who might read the New Yorker. She was in fact more like the New Jersey woman described here as Jo’s real mother, overweight and homely, balding with pink hair.

But Dame Maggie’s Elizabeth insists she is Jo’s mother, and Jo accepts the offer of a comforting embrace. The play swivels round to become an account of Sam’s grieving, as he rails impotently against the incursion and is subjected to violence and a lecture on the uncertainty of one’s own identity. This is Albee’s real subject. Only the redneck, thrice-married bigot Fred (Glenn Fleschler) is “sure” of himself, and he exhibits all the weaknesses of the classic bully; the utterly bemused Carol (brilliantly done by Jennifer Regan), might become wife number four - “I’m not doing anything else this week.”

Dame Maggie is as gloriously elegant as ever in her three-piece navy Jean Muir suit and double row of pearls. She resists all temptation to play a sort of Coral Browne grandeur, humanising the dialogue to the point of naturalistic comedy. Her speech about dying on a beach is suddenly moving, and you realise that if the lady is indeed an angel of death, she is also the figure of comfort and succour we should all hope to find once the physical terrors and psychological fears have been endured.

- Michael Coveney