Film star Orlando Bloom's stage debut in London's West End has met with a broadly positive response from critics. Bloom, best known for his role in the blockbuster Hollywood franchise Pirates of the Caribbean, stars in a revival of the David Storey play In Celebration.
The 30-year-old actor plays Steven, a teacher and failed writer, haunted by his abandonment of his Northern roots.
The actor is praised for his "fine sensitivity", but the Daily Express called the debut "disappointing".
But Storey is also addressing the alienation of sons educated out of their class and suffering a peculiar English mix of guilt and insecurity. Andrew's explanation for his sense of hurt may be a bit glib. But through Steven, Storey nails the traumatised rootlessness that comes from feeling one's life has no significance. Bloom lends Steven exactly the right sense of haunted taciturnity and withdrawn moodiness.
Bloom's sexual charisma and androgynous prettiness before the camera vanishes clean away on the stage's more distant perspective. He stands around looking caddish in his pencil-thin moustache, blankly disengaged and forever bathed in boredom. His cries of grief while asleep at night typify his performance, being unduly subdued.
Bloom is Steven Shaw, one of three sons returning from the comfy, middle-class South to celebrate his parents’ ruby wedding in the Yorkshire village where his father works as a coalminer. Superficially it’s an unrewarding part, because he spends most of the time looking wan and saying little but that he’s “fine”, but an important one.
He’s a teacher who hasn’t only abandoned the novel he was writing but has lost his old fire and ire. In his aloof, broken way he’s the most troubling proof of Storey’s thesis: that education and social mobility can damage the heart as well as open the mind.
While Paul Hilton as the deeply damaged Andrew wears his anger and bitterness on his sleeve, as youngest brother Stephen, Bloom’s is an internalised performance and all the more impressive for that.
Andrew, a solicitor who has given up his career to paint, remains angry about an incident in his childhood and, in Hilton's rather busy performance, all bobbing head and wiggling fingers, still seems a restless youth. Steven, a writer, has dreams that make him cry in his sleep.
The play also lacks the sympathy for women that would be expected of plays written a short time later. Mother is fingered as the family villain, a chilly expert in "domestic science" and "human hygiene." But the now-clichéd silent scream is Storey's only acknowledgment of her own pain. And some of the details of maternal contempt are droll - Steven, the youngest, had to stand at dinner because the family could afford only four chairs.
The admirable producer Sonia Friedman is clearly determined to keep the flame of "it's grim-up-north", working class drama alive in the West End.
And she doubtless hopes that the presence of Orlando Bloom... will be enough to entice punters into enduring two-and-a-half hours of punishing pessimism.
A brilliantined and moustached Orlando Bloom spends the entire evening looking pale and interesting.
It's not a challenging role, but he remembers his lines and doesn't bump into the furniture.
There are some impressive performances - in particular Paul Hilton as Andrew, the tortured failure who tears back all the pretence of family unity.
But sadly Orlando Bloom, in his London stage debut, is disappointing.
This is not entirely his fault. The part of Steven is too small and lacks the opportunity for spreading any dramatic wings.
Don't be misled by the title that In Celebration is light-hearted. It is a gloomy northern coalmines affair with a pulverisingly slow, first half.
Good cast here. Tim Healy, familiar from TV's Auf Wiedersehen Pet and Coronation Street... could speak more clearly, but he embodies the dignity and toughness of the north-eastern miner.
Movie pin-up Orlando Bloom shows fine sensitivity with this part.
This revival of David Storey's 1969 drama exactly doubles the number of straight plays by living British dramatists in the West End. Even then, one assumes it owes its life largely to Orlando Bloom's theatrical debut. It is a melancholy situation - but one can report Storey's tough and sturdy play stands the test of time, and that Bloom should guarantee it a young audience....
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