''Not enough Sex and the City" is a reasonable summary of Toby Young's amusing lament for his stint in New York, writing for Vanity Fair and thirsting for fame and fornication. It is rather sad, he tells us, to want to sleep with a different woman every night even though you've had only three one-night stands in your life.
Tim Fountain has adapted Young's book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People for the stage, and after a brief initial run in spring last year with Jack Davenport in the role, Young has taken to playing his odious youthful self in this hour-long monologue.
He doesn't do it badly for one who claims not to have been on stage since carrying a spear in an undergraduate production at Oxford 21 years ago. The trademark bald head, a pale egg banded with dark spectacle frames, bobs about the stage, and the well-planned movements and light changes ward off monotony. This may be a one-man show, but his mimicry is good enough to bring a dozen characters to life.
What gives the piece charm is its winsome self-parody of a thoroughly dislikable man on the make. The 30-year-old Young is portrayed as a klutz. He is obsessed with celebrity and determined to become a somebody, like the film stars he worships. At every opportunity he puts his foot in it, producing the gauchest lines at the big moments when he is face-to-face with his idols.
His chat-up routines are no better, and in New York the girls bite back. Time and again, he crashes and burns, despatched with a put-down or an obscenity from one of the city's very savvy beauties. An English accent was meant to open every door and undo every zip fastener, but successive waves of British journalists descending on New York have poisoned the well, so that now the Brits are associated with low incomes and small flats. They have become what the Australians are to London. (That's Young's view, not mine!)
His obsession with being at the right parties adds to the British reputation for freeloading and gatecrashing. Every party is guarded by "a clipboard Nazi". The important thing about any social event is not who is admitted, but who is kept out, and Young is definitely excludable material. The ins and outs are revised "every ten minutes", and everyone is categorised on a scale from A to quadruple A. The As get in only when the organisers need to fill a stadium.
New York's pervading ideology of political correctness is bound to land Young in trouble, given his Neanderthal approach to the opposite sex, although it is a good observation that the rules governing appropriate behaviour at the office have been put in place to protect women from being hit upon by dweebs like him who have an income of less than half a million dollars. He and a similarly minded pal invent an adolescent code in order to discuss the totty at the photocopier, free from the fear of being denounced by office eavesdroppers.
The main problem with the performance is that Young is too old to play Young. A decade has passed since he arrived in the Big Apple, and the goofy faux pas lose something when delivered by a man entering his fifth decade.
But Young has the advantage over any other actor in knowing the characters. His best impersonation is of Graydon Carter, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair. Young whips off his signature square-lens glasses and adopts a look of aggressive intensity, barking out lines like rapid gunfire. "You British take our money and look down your noses at us. We could take over your country in 20 minutes. There wouldn't be a chip store left standing." I'd like to meet a guy with a line in invective like that. And he is right. The most impecunious Brit without a single achievement to his name sneers at our North American cousins, especially those, like Carter, who have got rich by taking what they do seriously.
The play ends snobbishly with Young asserting the superiority of British values. His earnest-minded father, against whom he has rebelled for all these years, arrives in the city and finds himself patronised by the locals. His son explodes with snooty Oxbridge indignation because his father is "a giant" who helped to found the welfare state but New Yorkers don't value him as highly as a fashion photographer. Pass the sick bag. It served to prove Carter's point as much as Young's. I was not alone in thinking that the end needs a rewrite.
If I felt dissatisfied coming away from the theatre, maybe that was because what I had heard added up to not much more than a string of slickly delivered anecdotes, more like an after-dinner speech than a stage show. It will work for some people because it combines the city of Carrie Bradshaw with the laddish world of Men Behaving Badly and Top Gear. I admit that I guffawed more than once. Maybe I am closer to that world than I like (in my snooty Oxbridge way) to think.
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