Holy Terror

The writer Simon Gray is virtually a one-man publishing industry: between his plays, his books about his plays, and his new plays based on his previous plays, not to mention his newly published personal diaries, it’s enough to drive a publisher to madness.

Which, in his first ‘new’ play to reach the West End since the 2001 appearance of Japes at the Haymarket, is precisely what happens in The Holy Terror to a successful, middle-aged publisher, Mark Melon, as he addresses the Cheltenham Women’s Institute (or is it Chichester? He’s never quite sure), and replays scenes from a recent mental breakdown he’s suffered.

As so often with Gray, we’ve been here before; but this time, literally so, for exactly the same character in exactly the same predicament was previously explored in Gray’s 1988 play Melon. Now he’s been put into what is, remarkably, an entirely new play, first produced on radio in 1989 and subsequently staged in the US in 1991, now finally reaching the West End more than a decade later.

The result is a sometimes uneven, disorientating piece, about an uneven, disorientated psyche, in which Gray accumulates a powerful portrait of a man hurtling towards mental collapse. One can’t also but help seeking to detect autobiographical notes in this play’s remorseless journey of a man wrestling with his demons, as Gray has widely chronicled himself doing in his personal writing.

As we watch Melon losing his grip on reality, Simon Callow offers lightning changes of mood that take him in an instant from calm to rage and back again in a performance that’s an effective tour-de-force, but not ultimately, an affecting one. It’s partly a fault in the writing – we’re not really allowed to connect with any of the other characters who might have upped the stakes of the damage he’s causing and what he’s losing.

“You’ve started to bore yourself,” a shrink remarks to Melon, a comment on his progress towards recovery, but it’s not before he’s started to bore us. Still, Laurence Boswell’s production – played out on Es Devlin’s clever set, constantly evolving through receding arches covered in draft manuscripts – does its utmost to maintain our interest; and Callow is an always compelling narrator to the story of his own character’s life.

– Mark Shenton

NOTE: The following FOUR-STAR review dates from February 2004 and an earlier tour stop for this production.

“I am a great publisher who never missed an opportunity,” proclaims Mark
Melon. So why is this self-styled ‘enfant terrible’ to be
found delivering an address to the Cheltenham… sorry, Chichester… sorry,
Chipping Sodbury Women’s Institute? The answers lie in Simon Gray‘s
witty, pungent and dark-tinged satire, first produced off-Broadway 12 years
ago and now slickly revived by director Laurence Boswell.

The plan is for Boswell’s production to head West after its regional tour,
though that was also the target for Gray’s The Late Middle Classes,
whose 1999 run at the Gielgud was cancelled to make way for a short-lived
musical. Par for the course for Gray, whose Cell Mates was such
a hit with Stephen Fry he ran off to Bruges.

Here’s hoping The Holy Terror enjoys better luck. It surely deserves
it, if only for Simon Callow‘s tour de force as the arrogant book giant eaten
alive by inner demons.

Melon’s geographical confusion is a pointer to the nervous breakdown he has
recently suffered, the minutiae of which we see in extended flashback. At
the onset though, he’s at the top of his game: a cunning fox brought in to
revive the fortunes of ailing publishing house Harkness & Gladstone.

Melon’s strategy is to commission lurid sex-education manuals
(Masturbation Without Shame) and acquire Jackie Collins style
bonkbusters (The Madonna In Chains). But missing out on an Adrian
Mole-style sensation – coupled with a deranged conviction that his wife Kate
(Geraldine Alexander) is having an affair – sends him over the edge.

The first act, played out on an Es Devlin set filled with sliding panels
and plastered with yellowing memos, revels in Melon’s unscrupulous business
practices and gleeful manipulation of subordinates. After the interval,
though, the play takes a sombre turn as his mind deteriorates.

Gray never explicitly links Melon’s psychological disorder with his crimes
against literature, but clearly we are meant to see his fall from grace as
just desserts. It is to Callow’s credit, then, that – having seen him toy
with his employees, cheat on his wife and sexually harass his secretary
(Lydia Fox) – we can still feel sympathy for this monstrous creation.

Whether stripped to his smalls, climbing on the furniture or rolling on the
floor screaming, Callow brings such gusto to his role he is almost
exhausting to watch. Gray’s play might not merit such Herculean
endeavours, but it’s as good a vehicle as any for Callow’s scene-stealing
exuberance.

– Neil Smith (reviewed at Richmond Theatre)