Stratford Herald Review – Glorious!
Glorious!, The Loft Theatre, Leamington, until 7th December
PETER Quilter’s play is about the extraordinary New York eccentric heiress Florence Foster Jenkins whose money allows her to indulge in the deluded fantasy that she is a great opera singer.
All except one of the other cast members go along with the delusion, it fuelling Rebecca Clarke’s Dorothy’s indulgence in interior design and the creation of avian ‘artwork’, poor ageing English emigree’s St Clair’s (Jeremy Heynes) access to easy money and restaurant pianist’s opportunity to make some money by becoming Foster-Jenkins’s private accompanist.
The production opens with an extraordinary set designed by Richard Moore. The space is split in two with the upstage half depicting Florence’s apartment and the downstage half empty. Perhaps this is meant to show how we are distanced from Florence at the beginning and, as the action gradually moves downstage during the course of the play, we become closer to her and more sympathetic. It certainly establishes her self-delusion as it is described as crammed with furniture when there is very little and where the picture on the wall is askew.
This is a difficult play to mount. Its dramatic arc from alienation to sympathy is certainly well shown.
Director James Suckling decides to go down the route of caricature and farce. Rebecca Clarke’s Dorothy is ten times larger than life and has some amusing moments, particularly in one of her ‘two soups’ exits as she walked her dog Rikki. Rikki, too, is a farcical caricature. Florence’s maid Maria is presented in an extraordinary performance by Becky Young – Spanish speaking, seeming very tall and gawkily awkward. Lucinda Toomey’s loud and obnoxious Mrs Verrinder-Gedge is appropriately intrusive, strident and yet inwardly intimidated. Watch out for the funeral and subsequent surprise.
The decision is taken not to make either Jeremy Heynes’s St Clair or Luca Catena’s Cosme McMoon into stereotypes, despite all the covert gay gags about Cosme. Harrison Horsley’s several bit parts aren’t caricatures (perhaps except for the slightly exaggerated walks) either.
So this leaves us with Rayner Wilson’s Florence. Her singing is a hideous caricature, very well executed throughout, and yet her movement and posture much more naturalistic: an effective way of presenting her delusion.
The play ends with affection, welcome after the coldness of the opening, the awkwardness of the blocking and the almost complete absence of pretty stage pictures, Florence stage left suffused with gold light and Cosme stage right in ‘normal’ light.
Peter Buckroyd
