Wee Wizards Winkie

A Saturday afternoon matinee is a very civilised time to see a play really, you come out into the late afternoon and have much more time to think about what you've just seen, rather than dashing home on a crowded tube full of drunken idiots. I do feel sorry for Richard Griffiths though, having to do two shows a day. He is on stage for virtually the whole performance, and has as much dialogue as all the other characters put together. He was superb though, very invitingly conversational, and the antithesis of the declamatory actorly presence that someone like Richard Burton (who played this part in the filmed version) would have brought to the stage. That said maybe Griffiths was a bit too relaxed to plumb the deep chasm of dissatisfied emptiness that his character discovers upon revealing his patients manic elation.

The boy wizard himself was perfectly acceptable as the tormented adolescent, but he did have a hint of Bilbo Baggins about him for some reason? Jenny Agutter was rather wooden as an underwritten magistrate, and I suspect she was only there to provide another link to the film, where she played the young girl whose failed seduction tips the horse worshipping boy over the edge.

The staging was excellent, and as we had an audience member from the original 1973 production with us ,it was interesting to hear that it was actually very faithful to that production. Why change such an effective, if minimal, set, and the simple wire horse masks were brilliantly evocative. The central theme of the play, the doubts by the psychiatrist at diverting the boys extreme relationship with the world to normality, and the cost paid for such a diversion were subtly explored and never didactic. The combination of envy and revulsion he felt at the acts or worship that the boy indulged in were always sensitively presented and utterly believable, as was the total waste he felt when considering his own life and work.

This stands up remarkably well for a play over thirty years old, and hasn't seemed to date at all, and compared with today's high-tech theatrical productions, its simplicity was chillingly effective, and must have been incredibly impressive in the early '70's.