Christopher Hampton's eminently revivable play is a latterday Sunset Boulevard. But instead of a drifting hack meeting a marooned legend we see the Hungarian dramatist Odon von Horvath fictively and wittily projected into a post-1938 Hollywood packed with European emigres.
The real Horvath was killed in a freak accident on a Paris boulevard. But here he goes to Hollywood and becomes the archetypal Hampton hero: a detached, ironic observer encountering the ideological certainties of Bertolt Brecht and wanly contrasting the impoverished neglect of Heinrich Mann with the acclaim accorded his ponderously self-important brother, Thomas. The play both offers a vivid picture of wartime Hollywood where literary legends became studio hacks, and sharply counterpoints European experience with America's "tragic innocence".
The juiciest scenes in the play involve the collisions between Horvath and Brecht. The former believes a writer's primary duty is to interpret the world; the latter that it is his job to change it. Although Hampton's sympathies lie with Horvath, he endows Brecht with a bulldozing energy and wit that allow him to dominate every scene he is in. Brecht's detestation of Thomas Mann, contempt for America's "depraved cuteness" and conviction that he and Chaplin are the only first-rate directors are not only very funny but symbols of his iron certainty. And it's a sign of Hampton's maturity that he gives many of the best lines to the writer with whom he is least in sympathy.
What I noticed in John Crowley's production, more than in Gordon Davidson's in Los Angeles in 1982 or Peter Gill's at the National, is that the play is also about the melancholy of exile. Horvath himself happily adjusts to Hollywood's ebullient freakishness. But Hampton writes with real compassion about Heinrich Mann who, having written the original Blue Angel, is turned into a Burbank wage-slave, and about his wife, Nelly, who becomes an alcoholic wreck. Even the Olympian Thomas Mann is a prophet without a pulpit. For some Hollywood may have been a temporary paradise. But, in a brilliant Hampton phrase, it is an "Eden paid for out of other men's dreams".
Crowley's production, set in an empty swimming pool, also contains a number of fine performances. Ben Daniels's Horvath has exactly the right quality of amused detachment and there is first-rate support from Phil Davis as a chippy Brecht sockless in Santa Monica, Richard Johnson as a Heinrich Mann wreathed in melancholy dignity, Lizzy McInnerny as his blowsily boozy wife and Gawn Grainger as his self-satisfied brother. Hampton went on to script the musical of Sunset Boulevard; this exhilarating play is infinitely closer to the original's bittersweet spirit.