Smoking with Lulu

Janet Munsil‘s play has a fascinating premise. In 1978 the brilliant drama critic Kenneth Tynan persuaded Louise Brooks, reclusive silent-film goddess of the 1920s, to let him interview her over several days for a New Yorker magazine profile. They found they had much more in common than just chain-smoking.

The iconoclastic Tynan had long idolised Brooks’ sultry screen image, drawn to her decadent, self-destructive glamour and identifying with her sexually liberated free spirit. Their meeting had a profound effect on both of them. Ironically, the resulting article helped to revive interest in the almost forgotten Brooks, but within a year Tynan had died from emphysema.

Unfortunately, the dramatic potential of this encounter is not realised here. Munsil’s writing is intelligent, sometimes witty, but the play’s structure is weak and there’s insufficient tension. The two protagonists do quarrel at one point, but there isn’t enough sense of inner conflict. The result is a civilised ‘conversation piece’ rather than an exciting drama. An attempt is made to liven things up by making flesh Tynan’s erotic fantasies of Brooks’ Lulu; so we see the incarnation of her younger femme fatale cavorting on stage, sometimes mimicking the action from film clips shown on screen. However, this serves to distract rather than intensify.

The opportunities were there. More could have been made of Tynan’s efforts to reconcile his movie-inspired image of a dangerously attractive ‘bobbed’ flapper with the elderly, virtually bedridden woman he actually meets. The darker aspects of his (now well-known) sado-masochistic tendencies and of the parallels between Brooks’ own promiscuous youth and her tragic screen persona are hinted at but not explored. There are entertaining anecdotes about how Tynan introduced Tennesse Williams to Hemingway and Castro, and of the time Brooks danced a tango with Chaplin, but it’s hardly revelatory stuff.

Director David Giles has elicited decent-enough performances from his cast, though Peter Eyre is somewhat caught between impersonation of Tynan – including stammer and up-tilted chin – and straight acting. His gentle portrait is surely more sympathetic than the real man. Thelma Barlow rightly resists the temptation to give a Gloria Swanson-style grand dame performance (despite some similarities with Sunset Boulevard), suggesting someone who is both demanding and vulnerable. And Sophie Millett certainly looks the part of Lulu. Nonetheless, unlike the countless cigarettes smoked on stage, this production never really ignites.

– Neil Dowden