Reviews for Jeremy Northam in Rough Crossing (Thorndike Theatre, May 1987)
From contemporary local papers via the British Newspaper Archive. I found several reviews from Jeremy Northam's years in rep post drama school, but his turn in Tom Stoppard's farce Rough Crossing threw up an unexpected coincidence - it turns out that Gosford Park was not in fact the first time he played the piano while dressed up to look like Ivor Novello.
THE TROUBLES they've had on the QE2 are a mere spit in the ocean compared with the SS Italian Castle, scene of all the action in Tom's Stoppard's comedy Rough Crossing (at the Thorndike Theatre, Leatherhead until May 23).
An adaptation from a play by Ferenc Molnar (Hungarian playwright 1878-1952), with music by Andre Previn, this Stoppard's second collaboration with the composer; they worked together on Every Good Boy Deserves Favour ten years ago.
In Rough Crossing we have a play-within-a-play involving the cast of a musical in rehearsal at sea between Southampton and New York.
Francis Matthews, elegantly draped in velvet smoking jacket is Turai, the producer of this parody of a Coward type play, with Joanna Van Gyseghem as his precious leading lady Natasha.
David Baron is her equally precious leading man Ivor, and they're as madly in love with each other as they are with themselves.
Christopher Scott plays the moustachioed writer Gal, also in smoking jacket and doing an excellent job as Grouch Marx look-alike, including the cigar and the quick repartee.
I enjoyed Jeremy Northam as the young pianist Adam (either an expert mime artist or a very competent keyboard players). Adam is obsessed with Natasha, and is an inveterate stutterer, all down to his overbearing mother.
But, good performances from the entire cast notwithstanding, I have to take my hat off to a very funny man, Chris Emmett as ship steward Dvornichek. He's trying to find his sea-legs and throughout the play you see him, tray in hand, precariously negotiating the steps and the swaying deck. Eager to please Turai, Dvornichek trots off dutifully at his reuqest for glasses of brandy, which somehow he always manages to consume himself.
Meanwhile, he tries unsuccessfully to get to grips with cruising jargon, referring to the ship's balcony as the verandah, the engine room as the cellar, and the funnel as the chimney!
The second half of this fast-moving comedy gives us the rehearsal proper, complete with proscenium arch and laughably melodramatic script which Ivor and Natasha read through with growing disbelief, hamming it up on lines like, "You have plucked out my heart like an olive out of a dry martini."
The songs are pure corn, and the plot so complicated that it takes Dvornichek in one very comic scene to explain it to the bewildered cast and producer.
A storm at sea breaks in mid-rehearsal to add to the cast's difficulties, but troupers that they are, they carry on right through to the finale.
As Natasha so aptly points out, it's the construction of the play that's all important, and in this Stoppard is superlative, showing his talent as intellectual farceur. [Walton & Weybridge Informer 14 May 1987 p21]
Snippets from other reviews: "Jeremy Northam took the role of Adam, who was the brilliant musician brought in to add style to the New York premiere and could have been the leading man but for a speech problem. He described it as trouble with his starter motor, he had a stutter but could speak freely once he got going. This led to a number of comical situations as he regularly delivered his lines purposefully at the wrong time." [West Sussex County Times 17 May 1987 p17]
The Esher News (20 May 1987 p12) noted: "Around them are various hazy characters, including the composer (Jeremy Northam) who looks remarkably like Ivor Novello..." and The Stage (21 May 1987 p20) added: "Jeremy Northam appeared as a frustrated but adorable composer closely resembling Ivor Novello."
They were all pretty positive, even The Stage, but the reviewer for the Sunbury and Shepperton Herald (14 May 1987 p27) was absolutely not. They didn't like farces, and they hated the script, though they granted that the actors did the best they could with it, but it had only three jokes, and they didn't like any of them. They shot down the leads by describing them as two "middle-of-the-road actors" and finished up with: "The music was written by Andre Previn, but I can't really see why he bothered as the tunes were instantly forgettable and the singing weak.
My companion begged to be allowed to go and mend my broken car radio during the second half, but I persuaded him otherwise. As it turned out it would probably have been more fun. Definitely not one of Stoppard's best. SS."
