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VISITING MR GREEN

PERFECT TIMING: Warren Mitchell

Friday April 11,2008

By Neil Norman

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SOMETIMES the simple stuff works best.

This slim two-hander has been seen in 37 countries and in 22 languages and ran for a year in New York’s Union Square Theatre, where it opened in 1997. Author Jeff Baron obviously did something right with his debut play.

At first, it is easy to see why it has caught the popular imagination worldwide. Essentially a series of dialogues between a cantankerous old Jew and a young man-about-town, who is legally bound to visit him on a weekly basis, it covers the waterfront in terms of trans-generational divide.

Against Sean Cavanagh’s single set of a messy, old-fashioned apartment on the Upper West Side, Mr Green (Warren Mitchell) entertains his young visitor Ross Gardiner (Gideon Turner), at first with reluctance and then with increasing warmth.

Green has just lost his wife after 59 years of marriage (the balls of wool stuck with knitting needles is a nice touch) and is utterly alone and virtually helpless; Gardiner is also a metropolitan loner, having alienated his parents with the announcement that he is gay.

Both men, to a certain extent, are in denial, keeping their respective histories at bay. As the dialogues progress, so their pasts emerge.

Baron’s exploration of infirmity and grief is reasonably accurate if rather too anaesthetised to convince. Mitchell brings a great deal to the role of Mr Green, largely by underplaying the obvious comments, railing against sentimentality and delivering his waspish barbs with superb comic timing.

When Ross explains that he has been ordered by a judge to visit the old man because he was driving the car that “almost” ran him down, Green exclaims: “What is a murderer doing in my house?”

Turner strikes a fine balance between arrogance and sensitivity, catching the hurt and confusion that lies in the shallow grave of his heart.

As weeks go by, Green reveals aspects of his family history that drag the young man into caring about him and his disenfranchised family. Clearly, Baron is inviting a comparison between the respective persecutions of Jews and gays throughout history. But it is simplistic fare, made palatable by two excellent performances.

The play is so light and flimsy and so old-fashioned in its attitudes and momentum that it is as if Miller, Mamet or Albee had never existed. What might have seemed shocking in the Fifties now comes across as very tame indeed.
Sometimes the simple stuff is just simple-minded.

OUR VERDICT 3/5
Trafalgar Studios London, 9870 060 6632, booking until May 10