Afterlife

Published Thursday 12 June 2008 at 11:50 by Susan Elkin

This play is almost literally brilliant - it glitters, shines and gleams with Frayn’s trademark perceptive wit as it sends up the whole concept of theatre in the process of telling a strong, essentially tragic biographical story.

The central conceit is the placing of Max Reinhardt’s biography within the framework of many re-playings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Everyman, which Reinhardt first directed at Salzburg in 1920. The latter is a timeless morality play in which the skull-masked figure of death calls for the chosen ones. The dialogue moves seamlessly in and out of verse so that the audience is continually teased by never being quite sure when they are watching a play and when it’s a play within a play.

Roger Allam, rarely off stage as the rags-to-rags-via-riches Reinhardt, gives a towering, majestic account of this ebullient control freak of a man who directed scores of filmic shows with hundreds of extras, animals and extravagant sets in Austria, Germany and all over the world - but who didn’t know how to talk to people tete-a-tete. His greatest ‘show’ was Leopoldskron, the great baroque palace outside Salzburg which he restored, lived in for 18 years and then lost to the Nazis. Peter Davison’s set makes suitably grandiose use of hydraulics to reconstruct it on stage.

Abigail Cruttenden is outstanding as Helene Thimig, Reinhardt’s pretty, beautifully dressed, long-suffering, loyal, realistic actress-mistress and later wife. In contrast - a good dramatic balance - is the slightly horsey and clumpy but warmly efficient secretary Gusti Adler, played with panache by Selina Griffiths. Peter Forbes as Reinhardt’s long-suffering money man and David Burke as the benign and charming Prince Archbishop of Salzburg are both, in different ways, convincing contrasts to Allam’s Reinhardt.

Paul Charlier’s music, played live and led by Mary McAdam, enhances the baroque splendour of Leopoldskron and - by extension - the grandeur and eventual failure of Reinhardt’s increasingly unreasonable ambitions and visions. His final moments in a scruffy hotel room in New York are deeply moving. Don’t miss it.