Posh enough to make the Queen feel declassé: Patrick Marmion reviews Penelope Keith in Mrs Pat

Mrs Pat (Minerva Theatre, Chichester)

Verdict: Penelope’s got her down pat!

Rating:

In a sense, Penelope Keith has always done solo shows. With her notable height, haughty nose and voice like cut-crystal, she is a singular performer.

She is posh enough to make even Her Majesty the Queen feel somewhat déclassé.

Who better, then, to cast in this one-woman show about the inimitable prima donna of the late Victorian and Edwardian theatre: Mrs Patrick Campbell?

Penelope Keith portrays Mrs Patrick Campbell in Mrs Pat, held at the Chichester Festival Theatre

Born Beatrice Rose Stella Tanner, ‘Mrs Pat’ kept her first husband’s name for respectability, but she was very much her own woman in thespian furs and velvets.

Not only was she one of the greatest divas of her day, she had a turn of phrase to match. She claimed to have ‘put Ibsen on the tongue of London’s theatre-going public’ and was an intimate of George Bernard Shaw — calling him Joey and denouncing him as a scoundrel according to her mood.

Dame Penelope’s marvellously affected creation — found stranded here in a French railway station at the end of her life in 1940 — also speaks of others who ‘brushed the hem of her career’. The American critic Alexander Woollcott called her ‘a sinking ship firing on the rescuers’ and Keith fulfils that brief.

She is effortlessly tart, tetchy, trilling, triumphant and finally traduced. ‘A tour de force,’ she laments, ‘is always forced to tour.’

Alan Strachan’s production is certainly striking and deploys considerable resources to amplify Mrs Pat’s life story.

Alan Strachan’s production is certainly striking and deploys considerable resources to amplify Mrs Pat’s life story, as played by Penelope Keith 

Simon Higlett’s set lovingly recreates Toulouse train station, with its roof of iron and glass rising from anti-blast sandbags.

Period trunks suggest the personal and professional baggage that Mrs Pat trailed in her wake. And she is accessorised with her beloved Pekingese, quivering on her arm like a living muff.

Projections of other thesps of the period provide a powerpoint of Who’s Who.

Impressive as Keith and all this undoubtedly are, one wonders if it’s really enough for a full-length show with interval. An hour-long audience maybe.

Acid anecdotes of yesteryear do not an entirely satisfying evening make. 

RoosevElvis (Royal Court)

Verdict: It’s a hound dog

Rating:

Seven writers are credited with the American effort which opened at the Royal Court last night. It is a surprise any of them wanted to own up to such a muddled, childish piece.

It is by The Team, a New York group which has had successes at the Edinburgh Festival fringe.

A zany idea in Edinburgh does not always translate well to the London stage, alas. Lord knows how this made it to the taxpayer-funded Royal Court.

Libby King and Kristen Sieh appear in RoosevElvis, but Quentin Letts wasn't impressed

The idea here seems to be that Teddy Roosevelt (game-bagging U.S. president at the start of the 20th century) meets Elvis Presley.

When I heard this, my curiosity was tickled. Tough old Teddy and Elvis could have had an interesting conversation — the workhorse and the show pony, as one line puts it.

On closer inspection, the two meet only in the mind of an unhappy, 35-year-old, lesbian meat-processing factory worker from South Dakota (Libby King).

I think. It may be that at some point in the opaque action the Roosevelt character is actually assumed by the lesbian’s bisexual, short-term girlfriend (Kristen Sieh), who mocks the meat-processor’s lack of ambition.

To play Roosevelt, Miss Sieh sports a pair of muttonchop whiskers and a Baden-Powellish uniform. Miss King does a poor impression of Elvis.

The two characters are the only ones we see, apart from a couple of morose stagehands who wander on stage a few times. Who can blame them for looking glum?

These stagehands pull the odd curtain and push TV monitors around the place.

On the monitors we keep being shown footage of the lovers driving round South Dakota, sometimes as themselves, sometimes as Teddy and Elvis.

There are more shots of rural highway than you need or would ever want.

There is a vague message, towards the end, that the meat woman should be more proud of her gayness.

That seems a minor message compared to the need for dramatists to attend more closely to plot clarity, characterisation, narrative logic, entertainment and value for money.

Sportsman Roosevelt would not have wasted his gunpowder on such a turkey.

QUENTIN LETTS