'Sunshine Boys' in London: Anatomically Improbable - NYTimes.com

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/london-theater-journal-sunshine-in-different-sizes/?pagewanted=print[7/3/2012 9:39:12 AM]

JUNE 25, 2012, 11:40 AM

London Theater Journal: ‘Sunshine’ in Different Sizes

By BEN BRANTLEY

Willie Clark, the great vaudeville comedian, has a carved-in-stone list of things that are funny. Wordsthat have "k" sounds, for instance, like pickle and cake and cucumber. Might I add to that list the imageof a tufted Danny DeVito in striped pajamas and a sports jacket?

This sight is even funnier if you place Mr. DeVito, thus attired, next to Richard Griffiths in a pinstripedsuit and a fedora (accessorized with flashes of red that pick up on the colors of Mr. DeVito's pajamas).Why is this funny? Well, for starters, Mr. DeVito and Mr. Griffiths - who are starring in Neil Simon's"Sunshine Boys" at the Savoy Theater - are both anatomically improbable figures.

Mr. DeVito is uncommonly short, with the dimensions of a swollen fire hydrant. Mr. Griffiths isimposingly tall, and has the central circumference of a dining table for four. They seem to belong todifferent species, yet they also look alike, in the way dogs are said to come to resemble their owners.

Together, they make up one inevitable and impossible equation. That's comedy, folks. And it's one of thereasons that Thea Sharrock's production of "The Sunshine Boys," first staged on Broadway in 1972,works so incredibly well.

It helps of course that Mr. Griffiths (a Tony winner for "The History Boys") and Mr. DeVito (an Emmywinner for "Taxi"), playing the long-estranged comedy team known as Lewis and Clark, find the singularsouls that match their characters' appearances. And in doing so, they provide a telling anatomy of thesources and substance of Mr. Simon's success as a playwright.

Mr. Simon's plays, even the romantically wistful ones like "Barefoot in the Park" and "Brighton BeachMemoirs," have always moved to a vaudeville beat, to the unheard punctuation of rim shots and thepauses of holding for laughs. Wisecracks are the glue that keeps families and friends together in hisuniverse, allowing them to express love and hate without killing one another.

"The Sunshine Boys" strips that sensibility to its basics and reveals the raw hostility at its core. It alsocelebrates the clown's classic gift for turning anger into art. Estranged for more than a decade when theplay begins, after having worked together for 40-some years, Al Lewis (Mr. Griffiths) and Willie Clark(Mr. DeVito), really, really don't like each other. But each knows how darn good the other isprofessionally, and that they somehow complete each other on a stage.

In tracing the rocky road to a one-shot-only television reunion of Lewis and Clark, Mr. Griffiths and Mr.DeVito provide exact and disciplined portraits of exact and disciplined professionals. The comicmetabolisms they embody are as different as can be, and they clash in perfect harmony.

All fire and fury, Mr. DeVito's Willie brings to mind that immortal specimen of Looney Toons zoology,the Tasmanian Devil. Even immobile, he seems to be spinning and shooting off sparks. Mr. Griffiths is

'Sunshine Boys' in London: Anatomically Improbable - NYTimes.com

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/london-theater-journal-sunshine-in-different-sizes/?pagewanted=print[7/3/2012 9:39:12 AM]

the phlegm to Mr. DeVito's spleen. His Al Lewis is weighed down by a gravity that's compounded of hisown substantial flesh and an aggrieved sadness to match.

That doesn't mean that Al can't hold his own against Willie, on or off stage. And when you finally get tosee Lewis and Clark perform one of their famous sketches - the one about the doctor and the tax auditor- you understand perfectly why comedy is destiny for these two, and vice versa.

The face of Mr. Griffiths (whose American accent is irreproachable, by the way) often seems frozen onthe verge of both cascading tears and convulsive laughter, which sums up the spirit of the play. Thechoice is always laughter for Mr. Simon. But this insightful production, surprisingly delicate in itsbroadness, implies that it could always go the other way, too.

Mr. Simon uses comedy to keep the hounds of chaos at bay. Joe Orton's plays let those dogs out torampage and attack. On the same day I saw "The Sunshine Boys," I attended a matinee of "What theButler Saw," Orton's ultimate Dionysian farce (and final play), across the street at the VaudevilleTheater. (Can that be right, the Vaudeville Theater? Yep, I just double-checked.)

"Butler" is the second work I've seen on this trip (after Durrenmatt's "Physicists" at the DonmarWarehouse) to be set in a mental institution. But Orton doesn't rework the threadbare dichotomy ofsane mad people and demented doctors. Everybody's crazy in his universe, because everybody belongs tothe same absurd social order.

Orton's anarchy has to be delivered by performers who appear to believe unconditionally in theircharacters' irrefutable logic, rather in the way that closet drunks pretend to be sober. Sean Foley's revival- which stars Tim McInnerny and Samantha Bond as a psychiatrist and his sexually thwarted wife - issometimes too self-consciously madcap.

Still it was a pleasure to listen once again to some of the most elegantly subversive epigrams this side ofOscar Wilde. ("Have you taken up transvestism? I'd no idea our marriage teetered on the edge offashion?") And during a theater-going marathon that has included Greek tragedy, Jacobean revengeplays, drawing-room comedy and high farce, it was deeply, symmetrically satisfying to enter a world thatmanages to incorporate and explode elements from every one of those genres, and then some.

'Sunshine Boys' in London_ Anatomically Improbable - NYTimes.com.pdfnytimes.com'Sunshine Boys' in London: Anatomically Improbable - NYTimes.com