ajhlovestheatre

PLAZA SUITE

by Neil Simon

directed by John Benjamin Hickey

Savoy Theatre, London – until 13 April 2024

https://plazasuiteuk.com

A pair of beloved, long-term married screen stars, one of them making her hotly anticipated London stage debut, and a classic American comedy that has already proved to be a solid Broadway hit…what could possibly go wrong? As an evening of undemanding stargazing, John Benjamin Hickey’s plush production succeeds well enough – Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick work hard, if not always entirely convincingly, in a trio of roles apiece – but anybody looking for anything meaty or enlightening is likely to be disappointed. It’s not even all that funny, at least not for modern audiences.

The biggest problem with Plaza Suite is unfortunately Plaza Suite itself. Although the original New York production ran over 1000 performances nearly 50 years ago, and spawned a film adaptation, and two sequels, one set in Hollywood and the other in London, Neil Simon’s triptych of comedies all set in the same hotel room (the scenic design by John Lee Beatty is gorgeous) has not aged well.

In the first playlet we see a middle aged housewife Karen (Parker in a dowdy wig, reading as too young, too attractive and too vital but doing a nice line in wistful melancholy) reacting with remarkable equanimity when her husband admits to an affair before pleading with him to end it. It may have played well in the 1960s and 1970s, but presenting a woman as a codependent doormat seems bewildering today, and in the intervening years we’ve had plays like Stoppard’s The Real Thing and Patrick Marber’s Closer which dealt with the pain of marital infidelity, and didn’t reduce it to a couple of empty quips and a lot of whingeing. As if aware of the datedness of the sexual politics, Broderick delivers a philandering husband with an endearingly soft edge, where really the character requires more macho self absorption and dynamism. All in all, it’s a pretty wan hour.

Things improve after the interval, where Simon, Hickey and the starry leads put their collective feet on the comedy pedal, to much more pleasing effect. In Visitor from Hollywood, Broderick is a dandy LA movie bigwig, vaguely reminiscent of Mike Myers’s turn as Austin Powers, attempting to get with Parker’s radiantly ditsy, but smarter-than-she-initially-looks, former flame. It’s really more of a sketch than a play but it has a sparkle that revitalises the whole evening.

The final piece has Broderick and Parker as a pompous old codger and his vulgarian wife trying to coax their daughter out of the bathroom she’s locked herself into minutes before her wedding. It’s a silly but enjoyable premise, and Broderick comes into his own as the bewildered, barely coping pater. Parker is less comfortable, she’s more wilting flower when she should be chiffon-clad battleaxe. Her physical comedy seems too choreographed, too calculated and lacking in spontaneity to be truly funny. Individual moments land quite satisfyingly, but that’s what they remain: isolated moments of hilarity with little to connect them. As with the first act, Parker is too delicate, too youthful and just too plain nice to make this self-dramatising harridan plausible. Fun though he mostly is, Broderick appears to be giving pretty much the same performance in each play, albeit with changes of wig and costume.

Both leads are guilty at times of delivering the lines as though they’d just been fed them through earpieces and had never actually come across the script before, which deadens the pace somewhat. It almost feels under-rehearsed, but surely it can’t be given that it has already played a New York season. Simon’s writing is slick, sharp, and heartless.

With most performances already sold out, bar a few eye wateringly expensive premium tickets, Plaza Suite is a great big fat hit. Critical opinion is entirely superfluous in the face of this sort of stardom and hype. It’s an efficient production of an irrelevant play, with adequate turns from leading actors whose past work proves that they’re capable of being so much better than this with the right material. Something this insubstantial needs to be a lot more fun, quite frankly. It’s a glossy entertainment that’s forgotten almost before you get back out onto the Strand. I’d love to see SJP on stage again, in something more suited to her endearing, more dramatically inclined talent. Disappointing.