Stage Productions.

A Madhouse In Goa.

Year: - 1989. Author: - Martin Sherman. Director: - Robert Allan Ackerman. Venue: - Apollo West End & Lyric Hammersmith Theatre's. Rupert Graves: - David / Barnaby Grace.

 

Review / Synopsis:

Vanessa Redgrave, making her first appearnce in a new play for 17 years, would be advised to stick to the classics if she cannot find anything better than Martin Sherman's A Madhouse in Goa at the Lyric.

It is not in fact one play but two, and Vanessa Redgrave has two contrasting roles. In the first, set on Corfu, she is an American woman who visits the same hotel, run by a singularly graceless duo, each year during her endless peregrinations around the world.

In the second, set 24 years later on Santorini, that dramatic island carved out of a volcano, she is a former singer, dying of cancer, who is the guardian, so to speak, of a once-famous writer incapacitated by a stroke, preparing to sell the screen rights of his most famous book to a dreadful young Hollywood producer who talks in terms of "concepts" and "projects" and claims to have Jesus as his co-producer.

Where, one might ask, does Goa come into all this? Well, it does, but not so that one would notice much, for the plays, though they do not apparently have the same characters, have a veiled connection. But Martin Sherman is too keen to pile on all the things that worry the world today, mostly concerned with conservarion, but including AIDS, to worry, over-much about the plots of the plays.

The first, which is the more amusing, offers us Rupert Graves, who plays the producer in the second, as a shy young college graduate, touring Europe on his own, who is befriended by Mrs. Honey and has his homosexual tensions relieved by one of the unpleasant proprietors of the hotel, whose main concern is to get Mrs. Hoeny to change her dinner table so that the King of Greece can sit at it.

©1998 Peter Hepple.

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