Review Round-up: Has Bete Got Better with Age?
One of this summer’s most anticipated offerings, Matthew Warchus’ starry revival of David Hirson’s Moliere-inspired 1991 comedy La Bete opened last night (7 July 2010, previews from 26 June) at the West End’s Comedy Theatre, where it continues until 4 September 2010 prior to an immediate Broadway transfer.
The play is billed as “a comic tour de force” and centres on Elomire (Frasier‘s David Hyde Pierce), a high-minded classical dramatist who loves only the theatre, and Valere (Mark Rylance), a low-brow street clown who loves only himself. When the fickle princess (Joanna Lumley) decides she’s grown weary of Elomire’s royal theatre troupe, he and Valere are left fighting for survival as art squares off with ego in a literary showdown for the ages.
Could this art live up to the expectations raised by such a luminous company and creative team?
(three stars) – “I’ll say this much: David
Hirson‘s piece of Broadway-originating, pastiche Molière
seems less smugly self-admiring than it did on its first appearance in
1992 … David Hyde Pierce is very good at conveying
Elomire’s volcanic rage as his booklined study is colonised by Valere.
But, although he captures Elomire’s increasing Alceste-like isolation,
he is given insufficient support by Hirson’s text in enriching the
character. I have no complaints, however, about Joanna Lumley‘s
spoilt brat of a patron, who has undergone a gender-change since the
original production, nor about Stephen Ouimette as Elomire’s sidekick
… Warchus’ production is infinitely better balanced than the
original. He allows us to see that Valere’s work has a crude vigour,
and that the principled Elomire, who argues that ‘good verse conceals
its artifice ideally’, is dogmatic. But, even if there is now a hint of
dialectical debate, Hirson’s play still contains two fundamental flaws.
We actually get to see Valere’s lowbrow art, whereas Elomire’s
credentials as a serious artist have to be taken on trust. Valere
himself, set up as a boorish idiot, is also miraculously allowed to
turn into an articulate spokesman who impresses the patron by talk of
‘the slipping standards of our shallow culture’.”
Times
(five stars) – “We’ve waited for this one, in wondering hope
… It’s a tough gig, raising that much expectation, and it’s
no common play … it defies categorisation. You are forced to
laugh all through and then confront a bleak unresolved ending to the
central question … Rylance, of course, shines. Who else could
hold us, hysterical yet horrified, for the first half of David Hirson‘s headlong play as he preens and digresses, a compulsive
deluded entertainer rebuilding the very language … At one
stage, standing on the table, he declares ‘God love the critics! Bless
their picky hearts!’ Much nervous laughter in the stalls. But why pick?
It’s grown-up panto, it’s clever, it’s quite deep, it could not be
better done. You may hate it, but you’ll never see anything quite like
it again.”
– Theo Bosanquet & Ellie Pullen