After that, it's a bit of an anti-climax. As fate devours the most dysfunctional family in Thebes, the death of another son is cut out to simplify the story, but that leaves us with some very odd gaps. For one thing, it makes the suicide of Eurydice (a subdued performance by Zoë Aldrich) and the chorus's commentary on the accumulation of horrors hard to credit. And it leaves us feeling little more than a ho-hum sense of tragedy played out, rather than the awe that Greek drama should arouse.
While we're on the subject of troubled relationships in the shadow of death I went to The Sunshine Boys at the Savoy Theatre with the greatest reluctance, being generally allergic to any play that wears its cheerfulness so demandingly on its title. I then spent most of the first act snorting, giggling and generally having a whale of a time, in common with an audience hanging on Danny DeVito's every wisecrack.
The plot of Neil Simon's play, long regarded as a poor imitation of the peerless The Odd Couple, is of course downright daft. A long-estranged couple of Vaudeville comedians are to be brought back for a one-night-only performance. Little good can come of this. Willie nurses decades of grievance after Al (Richard Griffiths) popped out for a break from the partnership — and never returned. He lives in retirement in New Jersey, or "the countryside" as Manhattanite Willie witheringly puts it.
Around this trusty maypole Simon weaves a deft tale of old age, longing and death, complete with Vaudevillian put-downs: "How can you remember anything? Your blood doesn't circulate."
Griffiths has the heavy lifting to do here: a less exciting part than DeVito. The grand curmudgeon of the British stage lumbers on like a giant mobile armoire — only to end up waging war with Willie, simply by means of the two men competitively rearranging the furniture for their long-awaited reunion sketch. As the final ironies of the relationship unfold, we see the awful truth of The Sunshine Boys: as populations age, many more of us are going to end up like Willie and Al — just nowhere near so funny.
