Theatre - Michael Portillo finds an adaptation of When Harry Met Sally as good as the real thing
An eerie silence of anticipation falls over the theatre. There's no throat-clearing, no sweet wrappers, I swear people have stopped breathing. It's bizarre. The audience is frozen in suspense, waiting for how Alyson Hannigan will fake her orgasm. It's the moment everyone remembers from the movie When Harry Met Sally. She's going to show Harry that a woman making love is perfectly capable of play-acting to protect the frail male ego, and she makes her point by producing a wholly synthetic full-blown crescendo in a crowded cafe. That done, she smiles sweetly and returns to her food.
For the record, Hannigan (star of the movie American Wedding and sidekick to Buffy the Vampire Slayer) plays the scene with all the gusto of Meg Ryan's memorable screen performance. She's just as funny. Maybe we laugh even more because of all that pent-up breath longing for release (the audience's, I mean).
At first, the thought of going to see a show in which I already knew the gags seemed odd. But why? I don't think like that when I return to an Oscar Wilde play for the umpteenth time. Then I got the point of an adaptation such as this. It's like an Abba tribute show. We all know the words and we want it to be very like Abba, with just enough difference from the original to provide a fresh stimulus.
It was risky for Hannigan, who has never worked on the stage before, and her Harry (Luke Perry from Beverly Hills 90210) to attempt this transposition. The rehash on stage of The Graduate I saw starring Jerry Hall would not have encouraged them. But provided they could bring off the motion picture's greatest moments and, elsewhere in the drama, import something of themselves, an audience besotted with the film was longing to bathe them in appreciative affection. And luckily, that's how it has worked out.
Hannigan's goofy naivety fits the role splendidly. She's beautiful to watch, graceful and light around the stage, her trajectory traced by the sheen of her long red hair. Her clothes, which scene by scene transport us from 1987 to 2000, are superb. Perry is at least as good. It's not easy on stage to carry the part with hilarious facial expressions as Billy Crystal did on screen. But Perry is a fine comedian and commands the stage confidently. They look great together: she petite, he tall and strong. The audience wants things to work out for this attractive couple. In the bedroom scene, Perry gets his kit off (to gasps from the theatre), and that will do the audience figures no harm.
Director Loveday Ingram and designer Ultz have forgone the opportunities offered by the lofty proscenium at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, and instead built a thick wooden picture-frame through which we view the action. It's confined to a small white box, but lighting changes help convert it to an apartment, gym, restaurant or rooftop. Harry and Sally's disastrous first meeting, which in the film occurs when they're trapped together on a long car journey, is cleverly relocated indoors. Harry has been hired to paint Sally's apartment, but they can't wait for the paint to dry and to be rid of each other.
The frame around the stage has the proportions of a cinema screen - and indeed, the performance begins with a short movie. Marcy Kahan, who has adapted Nora Ephron's screenplay, has kept the original's documentary interludes where elderly couples whose marriages have lasted decades tell the camera how they met. While neither the couples nor their stories are lifted from the movie, they have been filmed and are projected on to sliding doors that close across the front of the stage. This works. The couples are as good as their cinematic predecessors, and when the doors reopen, the scenery behind has been changed.
To anyone who didn't see the film, let's say that the script isn't too dated. That men are from Mars and women are from Venus is more of a platitude now than it was in the 1980s when the movie first appeared, but no social change since has made that idea less true nor this plot less funny.
Harry personifies male arrogance. When he first meets Sally, he tells her that she has never had great sex, she only thinks she has. It's his presumption of knowing it all that leads to the scene in the cafe. Sally is maddening in a different way. Her sunny demeanour would certainly get me down, and she has an obsessive-compulsive streak. She takes an age to order lunch, over-specifying every detail of how she wants it served. It's to Harry's credit that, by the play's end, he manages to find her eccentricities lovable. He's the one who converts, exchanging the vocabulary of a serial stud for the sweet endearments that the romantic Sally has longed to hear.
Has Marcy Kahan successfully transposed Harry and Sally to the stage? Does Loveday Ingram's cinematographic staging work? Do Hannigan and Perry do justice to the roles created by Ryan and Crystal? To quote Sally in the cafe scene: "Yes! Yes! Yes!"
When Harry Met Sally is booking at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London W1 (0870 901 3356) until 29 May
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