The Prisoner of Second Avenue
Nineteen years ago Mercedes Ruehl and Kevin Spacey both won Tony Awards for their performances in the Broadway premiere of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers - and both would subsequently go on to become Oscar winning movie stars.
But both have retained their commitment to the theatre world from where they came, and now Spacey, artistic director of London’s Old Vic, makes that company’s first foray into the West End as producer at the Vaudeville Theatre, where he is reunited with Ruehl, making her London stage debut, as well as Jeff Goldblum (last seen on the London stage at the Vic, starring opposite Spacey in Mamet’s Speed the Plow), to present an alternately bleakly witty, dryly painful and surprisingly pertinent revival of a 1971 age of anxiety comedy by Neil Simon.
For years, Simon has been both over-valued as an easy laughter merchant and underrated as a dramatic craftsman, honing his characters with warmth as well as wit and finding the tears behind the laughter. Though The Prisoner of Second Avenue may not be in the same dramatic league of Brighton Beach Memoirs - a play that inaugurated Simon’s specifically autobiographical family trilogy and which originally received its British premiere at the National Theatre - it is a warmly-textured, affecting portrait of the solidarity of marriage in the face of life’s serial adversities, from the threats of looming redundancy amid economic meltdown to mental breakdown.
The power supply is in danger of being cut off to the life of Jeff Goldblum’s aptly named Mel Edison, a 47-year-old New York advertising executive, but if the energy company that shares his surname has not gone the way of Enron, a series of personal crises envelop him that threaten to pull him under, including the ransacking of the 14th floor apartment that he shares with his wife Edna on 88th Street and 2nd Avenue. While Simon is good on the perennial irritations of urban living like failing water supplies and falling water ones from aggrieved neighbours upstairs, Terry Johnson’s production misses a surprising detail when street noise keeps Mel up at 2.30am when the play opens but is entirely absent during scenes set in broad daylight.
But it’s the mental noise that gets progressively louder, and Johnson and his two actors in what is, for most of the show, a two-hander apart from the late arrival of Mel’s four siblings in the second act, otherwise get the texture just right. The gangly Goldblum - who seems to be channelling a version of Seinfeld’s Kramer in all his neurotic splendour - and Ruehl, tough, brassy and sensitive (with a touch of Marge Simpson in her vocal delivery) are a terrific, believable duo, making something both authentic and infinitely touching of their predicament.
