Theatre
Michael Portillo - Femme fatale
Published 05 July 2004
Theatre - A glittery show that's enough to turn you right off Mae West. By Michael Portillo
Dirty Blonde
Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2
I had never really thought about whether I like Mae West, but Dirty Blonde helped me decide that I do not. When I became a teenager, I was thrilled by the line: "Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" I was so excited that I understood what it meant. The trouble is that her humour was both puerile and repetitive, not to mention derivative. Consider West's "I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it" alongside Oscar Wilde's "I can resist everything except temptation" written the year before West was born. Wilde wrote all his own material, of course.
West went on and on, endlessly reworking her nymphomaniac routine on and off stage, and later on and off screen, constantly seeking to repeat the success of her 1928 stage hit Diamond Lil. Such was the awesome development of her performing talent that it carried her all the way from a show called Sex at the age of 33 to a movie named Sextette at the age of 85.
Mae West is definitely not my type. For a start, she had a figure that gave its name to a life vest. I am sure she was pleased to be immortalised, but it was not exactly flattering. She wore things that looked like Edwardian lampshades virtually from head to foot. That men found her attractive enough for Paramount to let her make 80 pictures is of some interest to students of social history, suggesting a degree of sexual repression among the male population.
Claudia Shear is both author and star of Dirty Blonde. She sings well and does a passable impression of West, slightly slurring her words as though she were smoking an invisible cigar - don't go there! But it is more a caricature than a performance. She does not have West's eyes (which were the late actress's one fine feature), nor even her figure. It may seem ungallant to comment on such matters, but if you are paying good money to watch someone dress up and frisk around in a glittering elasticated gown, the result must not call to mind a giant pepper-grinder in motion.
The play is not a dramatised biography of West. Alas, it is much worse. A couple of obsessive West fans, Jo and Charlie, with sizzling personalities such as you might associate with train-spotters, meet by chance at the star's graveside on her birthday, and we follow their clunking court-ship in parallel with the events of West's life. Yes, Dirty Blonde is yet another play that repeatedly shifts in time - though in fairness it first appeared off Broadway in 2000, when maybe the technique had not yet been done to death. Shear plays Jo as well as Mae and, being infatuated with West, she wears her idol's old dresses. This makes it easier for her to jump from one decade to another, losing the invisible cigar when she wants to be Jo and hobbling a bit when she wants to be Mae in old age.
Shear is not the only one who gets to wear diamonds and boas. Charlie (played by a stocky Kevin Chamberlain) met West when he was a teenager and was gifted some of her clothes, which has been enough to turn him into a transvestite. As the play wiggles towards its conclusion, Charlie, with his back to the audience, dons the full regalia, receives his make-up and the finishing touches from Jo, and turns round to reveal that . . . he looks every bit as hideous as we would have guessed. The play breaks new ground. I have seen transvestism and comedy (as in Shakespeare) and transvestism and horror (for example, Michael Caine in Dressed to Kill), but transvestism and schmaltz is a new one on me.
As Jo and Charlie consummate their relationship, they trade Mae West lines. "Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before", "I only like two kinds of men: domestic and foreign" and many more. Unfortunately, the audience had just read those wisecracks because they are all printed in the programme, so they lost some of their impact.
The scene did provide a clue as to why the show was successful in the US. Many Americans are obsessed with the trivia of stardom. There is huge Hollywood and Broadway nostalgia. I can imagine the ritualistic incantation of West's lines would evoke an appreciative response from an elderly theatre audience in New York. Most of the theatregoers who shared the Duke of York's with me were also elderly, but in a very British way, they managed to keep their appreciation hidden.
I am sorry that this has been a pretty mean review. I do not think that Shear will be too upset by a bad notice in the New Statesman, given that Dirty Blonde collected five Tony nominations when it opened in the Big Apple. Maybe it just does not travel well.
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