Robert Tanitch reviews Five Finger Exercise at Coronet Print Room, Notting Hill Gate, London WII
The Coronet opened in 1898. It has been through many stages since then. It is now, at long last, back to being a theatre.
Peter Shaffer, now 89, probably best known today as the author of Amadeus and Equus, had his first big critical and commercial success in 1958 when John Gielgud directed Five Finger Exercise in the West End.
Watching Jamie Glover’s revival, with a packed house on a Tuesday night, I wondered why it had had no major revival since.
Sixty years on it now feels as if it belongs to an earlier era than 1958, to a time well before the arrival of the kitchen sink dramas and all the angry young men.
A nice young German, 22 years old, has come to England to start a new life. He is employed as a tutor to the 14-year-old daughter of a successful cheap furniture manufacturer and his wife who also have a 19-year-old son who is up at Cambridge University.
What separates so many children from their parents is education. The longer he stays at university, the less he and his father find they have in common, the less they find to say to each other, till, finally, they seem only to be meeting for meals and rows.
The irony is that the young German thinks this bickering household ideal and wants to be part of it. He has hopes of becoming a British subject and is totally unaware of the effect he is having sexually on mother and son. The play builds to a strong melodramatic climax.
Jason Merrells makes the self-made businessman a much more sympathetic figure than you might expect. His wife (Lucy Cohu) thinks he is vulgar; when it is she, with her phoney cultural pretensions, who is the vulgar one.
Lorne MacFadyen and Tom Morley, two highly promising young actors, are cast as the tutor and sensitive son.
In the original John Gielgud production they were played by the then-unknown Michael Bryant and Brian Bedford who both went on to have highly distinguished careers in the theatre, a good omen for the present actors.
Perhaps this is a good moment to point out that Shaffer’s Black Comedy, one of the best farces of the 20th century, is also long overdue for a major revival.
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