L.A. TIMES
By Dan Sullivan, Times Theater Critic
If
you are hungry to see some fine, taut, intelligent acting, get over
to the Matrix Theatre, where Ian McShane and a well-matched Actors
For Themselves company are providing a first-rate revival of John
Osborne's "Inadmissible Evidence" (1965).
McShane was quoted in Saturday's Times about the
need for the actor to do more than reflect his character. He
should also illumine his character. When playing a character
as disagreeable as Osborne's Bill Maitland, there must be a
temptation to judge him as well. Bill really is a bit of a
cad.
But McShane plays it down the middle. You could
leave this performance detesting Maitland, or identifying with him,
or pitying him. It would depend on where you are in your own life.
McShane simply puts his man on the stand and lets him speak.
Passionately. That's why Bill doesn't bore us, for all his conceit.
Osborne and McShane make Maitland a fascinating case, not so much
for his murky midlife crisis (nothing new there) but for the
commitment with which he is acting it out.
Not only is he fearsomely articulate as he
accuses himself before his own imagined jury (the play is laid
partly in Bill's mind, partly in his law office), his every action
seems to be a plea for punishment and forgiveness. This is a man who
finds the human race, including himself, absolutely despicable. Yet
he still craves love: unconditioned, accepting, redeeming.
By the end of the play Bill has succeeded in
driving off everybody who might love him, including his teen-age
daughter, and scaring off everybody who works for him. Sitting in
his law office at the start of another god-awful day, he probably
hasn't quite reached the end of his mendacity. But it's coming.
Whether he commits suicide or goes off to join the Trappists, the
boil has got to burst.
His only untrue self-accusation is that of
mediocrity. This is a man of extremes (including an extreme
coldness) and McShane understands both his need to dump his
self-loathing on the people around him and his unacknowledged need
to be brought up short, a kindness that nobody in his life quite has
the guts to perform. He's like a Kate without a Petrucchio.
The actors surrounding McShane have less to do.
But under the direction of Kristoffer Siegel-Tabori, each provides
as full an account of his character's identity as the star. Duncan
Ross, for example, makes it clear that Maitland's poker-faced
right-hand man puts up with his abuse for some very good reason of
his own, totally apart from personal affection; we don't need to
know the exact reason to see that it's there.
Peter Mitchel makes the youngest man in the
office a cautious type who may be the plodder that Maitland thinks,
but may also be a Maitland in embryo, once he's finally forgotten
Mum and the lessons learned back home. Robin Pearson Rose is the
secretary who has learned too many lessons from Maitland, and Jenny
Wright is the new girl, who may have some to teach him.
Jeanne Ruskin plays Maitland's mistress with a
coolness clearly based in self-protection and Kate Fitzmaurice plays
a client who both wants to leave her husband and to make him feel
like more of a man, one of the paradoxes that Maitland is sick of
dealing with in his profession.
Fitzmaurice, Wright and Mitchel also play other
roles, and well, but I wish that director Tabori had violated
Osborne's wishes here and found separate actors for these parts.
This would have added to the richness of the show, without
necessarily subtracting from its quasi-hallucinatory air. One can
see many faces in a dream.
A. Clark Duncan's set appears to be a tailored
lawyer's office, but with one brilliant light stroke (Barbara Ling
did the lighting) we see a huge dump of law briefs behind it, as
messy as Maitland's increasingly disturbed mind. The effect seems
less brilliant each time it's used, but carping at this
"Inadmissible Evidence" would be ungrateful. It is dead-accurate
theater.
- WINNER, 1985 L.A. Drama
Critics Circle Award: