Breakfast at Tiffany's fails to ignite
This isn't the first time that trading on affection for a Hollywood classic has fallen flat in the West End. A few years back, Darryl Hannah inevitably failed to recreate Monroe s sexually-charged star wa
Breakfast at Tiffany's
Haymarket Theatre
One star
This isn't the first time that trading on affection for a Hollywood classic has fallen flat in the West End. A few years back, Darryl Hannah inevitably failed to recreate Monroe's sexually-charged star wattage in The Seven Year Itch. Now, despite a committed, technically proficient performance, Anna Friel struggles under the shadow cast by Audrey Hepburn's portrayal of New York socialite Holly Golightly.
You may also want to watch:
Both stories are now dated, but titillated 50s America with risqu� kooky female characters; their screen incarnations heavily reliant on Hollywood stardust to paper over narrative deficiencies. (Hepburn as former Texan teenage bride Lula Mae? Please!)
While adaptor Samuel Adamson has nobly returned to Truman Capote's 1958 novella to add punch to this revival, the charm of the source material proves elusive and the two hour plus traffic frankly drags.
Most Read
- 1 Jeremy Corbyn launches Peace and Justice Project with calls to action
- 2 Arsenal boss Arteta worried about player burnout
- 3 O2 Centre: developer Landsec 'looking to re-provide' Sainsbury's
- 4 Is lockdown working in north London? Here's what the latest data tells us
- 5 Crouch End Vampires help feed homeless with soup kitchen fundraiser
- 6 Homeschooling in lockdown: Top tips for a north London parent
- 7 Arsenal column: Granit Xhaka the stand out performer since Boxing Day but some of his senior professionals continue to disappoint
- 8 Keepers read bedtime 'tails' from London Zoo during closure
- 9 Joan Bakewell fires legal threat to government over second Covid jab
- 10 Lord's Cricket Ground used as Covid-19 vaccination centre
The unfocused plot centres around the shock return of Holly's Texan husband, her ill-advised visits to a drug trafficker in Sing Sing that get her arrested and her love for a rich Brazilian who abandons her.
But it is the figure of the elusively unknowable, frustratingly charismatic, restlessly self-inventing Holly who must hold it together
Friel is more knowing escort girl than Hepburn's charmingly na�ve eccentric, but if, like me, you remain stony-hearted through her tough but vulnerable, self-consciously wild and crazy, Sally Bowles shtick, then all is lost.
Joseph Cross is terribly young to play William Parsons, the successful middle-aged novelist looking back from the 50s at his war-time experiences in a New York brownstone where Holly is a tenant.
"You're the cleverest person I know," she tells the budding writer. Sadly there's nothing in either script or performance to back this up, but he ably suggests William's sexual ambivalence and fumbling to articulate different kinds of love.
Director Sean Mathias tries to fill the space by peopling 1940s New York's social scene with absurdly huge performances; James Dreyfus is a fat bellowing Hollywood agent and Suzanne Bertish a roller-skating, opera yodelling, landlady who hurls abuse at Holly. Just like the gratuitous nude scenes, it reeks of desperation. As Holly would say: "What a bore darling."
Bridget Galton