Butley comes to town, as played by The Wire's Dominic West. And who knew McNulty would be so good at comedy? Adam Dolan reviews the play.
Simon Gray's award-winning play Butley is now showing in London's Duchess Theatre, starring Dominic West from The Wire as the titular self-destructive English professor. In one day Butley manages to lose his wife and his male lover, alienates most of his co-workers and students, and his unravelling is spectacular to watch, as it's fantastically dark and amusing.To put it simply, Dominic West is astoundingly good in this play. He so completely nails both the comic and tragic aspects of the infinitely troubled professor that I'd say it was the role he was born to play, if not for the fact that he was so bloody fantastic as Detective McNulty in The Wire. West manages to take a character that, by all rights, should inspire nothing but loathing and hatred, and so completely humanises him that he becomes pitiful, sympathetic and even strangely likeable.
But the same can't be said for all on stage. I can't understand why Paul McGann agreed to play the tiny role of Reg Nuttall, Butley's lover's boyfriend. I'm a McGann fan; like most people of my generation Withnail and I holds a special place in my heart, but his role amounts to little more than a glorified cameo - he's in exactly one scene. Secondly, as much as I like the guy, it has to be said that his accent is atrocious. It took me a few minutes to decide what regional dialect he was going for, despite knowing that the character was supposed to be from Leeds. At times Butley imitates Reg, and West's mocking parody is infinitely superior to McGann's accent of indeterminate origin.
The dialogue of this incomparable character is also superior to most. It's wordy and magniloquent, full of literary references and jokes about the experience of higher-education. It's relatively timeless subject-matter for comedy and though the play was written in 1970, it's still funny forty odd years later, and works great on Peter McKintosh's fantastic set. He's created a thing of beauty by employing a forced perspective with the set-pieces; everything warps and leads back to a central iris to create the illusion of exaggerated space and depth.
Simon Gray's petulant, self-deprecating creation is fantastically rich and so convincingly brought to life by Dominic West, and it belongs in this smaller West End venue, particularly with West as the lead. A great deal of the best comic and indeed, dramatic moments come from West's subtle facial expressions, something that would be totally lost in a larger theatre. One rarely sees a character of such depth, realism and tortured complexity come to life in a two-hour play.
Authors have written entire novels without giving the same level of insight to such a singular protagonist. Butley is the type of play that makes you wish for a sequel; leaving the theatre I almost feverishly longed to know what Ben Butley did next.
Butley runs at the Duchess Theatre from the 1st of June to 25th of August.
Butley runs at the Duchess Theatre from the 1st of June to 25th of August.
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