Tales from Hollywood

Synopsis

Winner of The Evening Standard Best Comedy Award for 1983, this play is a mixture of fact and fantasy and evokes the vagaries of Tinseltown from the late 30's to 1950 McCarthyism - the naivety, hypocrisy, charm - which welcomed a generation of gifted German writers fleeing Nazism, employing them as screenwriters for the major film companies.

Our Review:

3 May 2001

You could be forgiven for experiencing a creeping sense of deja vu when you visit the Donmar. Not just in its relentless trawl through the 1980s theatrical repertoire - from Shepard and Sondheim to Stoppard - but also in the overlap of some of the concerns being addressed.

After the exposure of marital infidelity in both The Real Thing and Passion Play, the theatre now follows CP Taylor's Good with Christopher Hampton’s Tales from Hollywood, which, like Good, concerns a man trying to come to terms with his possible collusion with the Nazi regime. In its bringing together of a number of intellectual giants, Hampton's 1982 play similarly recalls Terry Johnson's Insignificance, also revived here.

But Tales (premiered in LA and subsequently seen at the National in 1983) is definitely worth a second look on its own meaty, intelligent terms, and is full of its own complex pa...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 3 May 2001:

Fantastic, fantastic show. Really thought-provoking and an excellent why-didn't-i-see-that? twist at the end. Great cast too - esp, as your reviewer says, Brecht and Daniels....

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