The Female Odd Couple

When Neil Simon wrote The Odd Couple back in the 1960s, he could scarcely have forecast its longevity. An Oscar-nominated film version followed the Broadway staging, with two television series and a sequel for good measure.

So what dilemmas may have faced him when creating The Female Odd Couple in the 1980s? Well, the options would have been to produce either a sequel of sorts, or an imitative rewrite with the sexual roles reversed.

What we get is a project that falls somewhere between the two ideas, leaning more towards the imitative. At the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue, we find Jenny Seagrove and Paula Wilcox reprising the roles that proved such a screen hit for Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon respectively.

Seagrove is the sports-loving, independent type who confesses, ‘I even make a mess after I’ve been reading a book.’ The scenes are all set in her apartment, which doesn’t truly convey a great sense of disordered clutter. Casually draped with a few Budweiser bottles, yes, but hardly the fleapit required to make the later contrasts hit home.

Into Seagrove’s female circle of Trivial Pursuit types comes the bombshell of their mutual friend Florence. Potentially suicidal after the break-up of her marriage, she is portrayed with comic conviction by an excellent Paula Wilcox. Indeed, this is striking ensemble acting all round, even if individual characters get little chance to really develop out of the script.

The debate about using American accents may gain further fuel here, although references to baseball and hamburgers might have rung hollow with refined English vowels. Seagrove, looking radiant in a glossy American football shirt, has certainly paid keen attention to her dialect coach. Yet her chain-smoking character does rather date the play back to the 1960s. The show’s interval found the Apollo’s foyer drowsy with smoke from the banished few, huddled in the cigarette safety zone. And it’s hard to imagine a contemporary play from health-conscious America sending its lead characters out with a perpetual fag in hand.

Even the soundtrack that greets you is heavy with nostalgia. Simon also revises some of his favourite gags from the original but merely shifts them into the new setting. There are some fresh wisecracks on offer, but the script often feels like a wasted opportunity. Even the contrast between house-proud Florence and slovenly Olive provokes more amusement than discord. Wilcox gives her eccentric, dizzy and tearful character plenty of panache, although the latent melancholy in Seagrove’s Olive isn’t convincingly explored.

How much more interesting it might have been for Simon to have invented two genuinely new and incompatible types to toy with. Yet a suspicion lurks that we might always find the notion of two men thrown together when needs must to contain both more humour, and greater pathos, than two women in the same plight. Even despite the advancements made in equality since Simon’s original concept.

Now that’s odd.

Gareth Thompson