In the opening minute of Small Hotel, faded chat show host Larry is stabbed in the stomach at a train station cash machine.
Ralph Fiennes as Larry | Photo © Marc Brenner
His immediate response to this is to perkily tap dance, accompanied by an unidentified woman in an eye patch and black suit, who was serving drinks but then swiftly reappears as a chanteuse draped across a piano…
If you are able to accept and just go with this unexplained series of events, you may well enjoy Small Hotel, with its sporadic sequences of soft shoe shuffles, snatches of repeated song and haiku poetry sprinkled amidst scenes of romance, regret and recrimination which may or may not be the recollections of a dead man.
But for those of us who prefer to have a clearer sense of the overall intent of the play, and a reason for its surreal flourishes (are the incongruous tap sequences simply there to cover costume changes?), the effect may be more one of confusion and disengagement.
Small Hotel is the third and final production of the Theatre Royal’s Ralph Fiennes season; it’s a brand new play by Rebecca Lenkiewicz which was commissioned by Fiennes to appear in (he ends up playing two roles of twin brothers Larry and Richard, named after Broadway songwriters Rodgers and Hart, for reasons predictably unexplained).
It follows Larry, whose chat show career has waned to the extent that he is now appearing on shopping channels selling executive cases.
Following his stabbing, he appears to briefly meet his dead mother Athena (Francesca Annis) in heaven/limbo before re-establishing contact and romance with his much younger ex-girlfriend Marianne (Rosalind Eleazar), having FaceTime chats with his isolated and ailing brother Richard (Fiennes again, appearing on screen to interact with his on-stage counterpart) and dealing ineffectually with his wheedling alcoholic mother.
All the while, the fourth and final character, the eye-patched Ava (Rachel Tucker) observes proceedings, like a cross between Death, St Peter and the MC from Cabaret.
Whether these scenes are the shattered life-flashes of a dying man is not made explicit, as Larry drifts from one sequence to the next, but the assumption is that he is trying to resolve his relationships with his nearest and dearest from limbo.
The script is trying to cover a multitude of subjects in its 90 minute running time, from suicide to fridge cameras and from water pollution to marital breakdown, and the disconnected hopping-around between these targets will not be to everyone’s taste, all leading to a bizarre final scene which appears from nowhere.
That is not to decry anything about the production itself. Director Holly Race Roughan has a firm hand on the pace and humour of the piece, using designer Bob Crowley’s seamless sets on a revolve to drift between scenes as if in a waking dreamscape, all against an inky black background ominously foreshadowing Larry’s death, supported by Sally Ferguson’s stark lighting designs.
All four performances are adroit and committed. Fiennes skilfully balances the confidence of his chat show host personality with a downtrodden demeanour, and has some impressive soft shoe steps to boot; his conversations with video recordings of him as Richard are impressively handled, though weirdly the Richard character seems to suit him better.
Eleazar matches Fiennes (no mean feat) in timing, energy and emotional range, bringing a fragile rawness to Marianne. Annis effectively underplays the alcoholism of Athena and makes her both strident and vulnerable, whilst West End favourite Tucker sings, dances and menaces with relish.
These performances soar impressively over their material, however, and the packed theatre bears witness to the superior draw of star power over the play itself, which in a no-star, low-budget production may not seem out of place at the Edinburgh Fringe.
As Marianne herself states in the restaurant scene, there are directors who will cast big name actors to disguise the fact that a film is boring. Life imitating art indeed.
Small Hotel is showing at Theatre Royal Bath until 18th October. Box office: 01225 448844.
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Reviewer: Steve Huggins
