Visiting Mr Green

Published Wednesday 7 November 2007 at 14:50 by John Thaxter

Now a New Australian, Warren Mitchell has been enticed back from Melbourne for yet another run in with Mr Green, the 86-year-old curmudgeon we first saw him portray in a millennium production at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.

Now nearer in age to the role, he takes his curtain call with the same geriatric dodderiness as the character, but his expert comedy timing as a New York Jewish widower, kvetching away in solitary squalor and denial, suggests otherwise.

Jeff Baron’s two-hander is a star vehicle for Mitchell, with upcoming David Sturzaker in the stooge role of a visiting young banker doing community service as penance for reckless driving. That may be the theory, even the fact of previous productions, but Sturzaker, playing a gay man rejected by his orthodox family, gives every bit as much as he gets, turning this melancholy piece into a brisk, well-matched comedy duo, with Mitchell often cast as the droll Yiddish, reactive figure.

Eleven years on from its Miami premiere, the play is showing its age. In a programme note Baron refers to an updated version, including giving the banker a cell phone, but Patrick Garland’s staging is the old original. Where it does still have a startling currency is the way in which the old man, a kosher bigot, has brought sorrow upon himself, his late wife and their only daughter and her family, with his cruel refusal to acknowledge her marriage outside the Jewish faith. This object lesson in hard line attitudes and the need for forgiveness provides the uplifting message in the second half of this short, gentle comedy.