The cliche has it that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there. A good line to roll out when The Stones headline Glastonbury for the umpteenth time, but it neglects those who can't remember the Sixties because they're not here. Larry Mollin's play The Screenwriter's Daughter (at The Leicester Square Theatre Lounge until 29 November) gives voice to one such woman, a member of the infamous 27 Club to boot.
Based on real-life events, The Screenwriter is
Ben Hecht, a old-school Hollywood hand who wrote across a range of formats and gave his words to plenty of screen legends up to and including
Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind. Once a radical and still with strong pro-Israel (and, hence, anti-British) views, he bickers with his daughter, Jenny, an early adopter of the counter-culture that was to sweep the USA and Europe in the late Sixties. She wants his blessing to go to Europe with the controversial
Living Theatre Group to foment revolution, both personal and political, but he wants her to grow up to be a nice Jewish New York mother with a daughter of her own who "marries a Kennedy", natch. It's 1964, so nobody is quite sure which generation will win the argument.
The play comprises mainly conversations between the two, as they draw closer emotionally, only to separate politically, ultimately for good.
Paul Easom's Ben has plenty of wisecracks at almost 70 years of age and the privileged man's way of rationalising his own faults whilst tirelessly picking over his daughter's. Samantha Dakin's Jenny has the centre-parted blonde hair and lazy look in her eye that gives her a touch of Michelle Phillips, but she seems too knowing to believe the naive views she espouses. Indeed, the play's unconventional structure, with the fourth wall broken on occasion and a time frame that throws itself forward when it sees fit, does not always help us understand fully the dilemmas the characters face.
There's good work from
Tom Hunter and Laura Pradelska as the two Svengali figures tempting Jenny with the trip to Europe and a new form of liberated theatre - indeed, they offer a new world in the Old World, dropping names like Baader-Meinhof into her ear like so much radical catnip.
Though, at just over an hour all-through, the play never gets dull, there's just not quite enough to like in the characters for us to really care about their destinies and empathise with their indecision. They're so stubborn and lack the humility to see others' points of view and compromise. To a lesser extent and in different environments, these trials of strength arise at some point between all parents and their children as kids become adults - but most people just work things out. With a little less arrogance, so could the screenwriter and his daughter. It's an intransigence that cost both a heavy price.
Photo Henika Thompson.
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