Review – Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks

To answer a question that’s been puzzling some people: no, the West End Whingers do not agree on everything. Even so, it comes as some surprise that their first major schism should be caused by such an uncontroversial, inoffensive piece as Richard Alfieri’s play Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks, currently playing at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.

Following almost universal scathing reviews* WEW were moist at the prospect of seeing yet another truly dreadful production.

Billy Zane (no stranger to sentimental pap, having been in Titanic) plays gay dance instructor Michael who is engaged to give six dance lessons in six weeks to ageing Baptist minister’s wife Lily (Claire Bloom) in her Florida condo.

It sounds like a promising premise for a light comedy and the publicity claims “you’ll laugh; you’ll cry; you’ll cha-cha-cha”. Well, Phil wasn’t laughing; the only tears he shed were as he begged to be allowed to leave in the interval; and his only dancing is likely to be on the grave of this ill-fated production (booking until March but there were only a smattering of people in the audience, so we shall see…)

Andrew, on the other hand, did laugh on several occasions. And while he may not have been moved to tears, or dancing in the aisles, he did bestow one of his highest accolades: “Well, I wasn’t bored”.

Poor Claire Bloom (who, we have been asked to point out, was in the excellent 1963 horror film, The Haunting). She’s still luminous but is miscast here, struggling with a southern accent and on stage props. It’s left to Billy Zane in his West End debut (thankfully underplaying the camp) to keep this sinking ship afloat.

Each scene follows the same dreary path. Lily answers the door to Michael, they chat, they row, they make up, they dance, Lily answers the phone. It’s a very bad sit-com. Apparently it’s been hugely popular around the world and is going to be made into a movie. God help us all.

The direction’s terrible, the design is terrible, resembling a GMTV set knocked together from left-over pieces of MDF. A chair (which presumably they’d forgotten to put on at the start of the play) mysteriously appeared after the first scene in one of the protracted scene changes. We say “changes”, the set remains the same throughout while two figures rearrange props in the dark making it appear that Lily’s flat is being burgled. Phil was particularly concerned that Lily never seems to wash up as her cutlery remains in the same position in the drainer throughout the six weeks that pass.

Sloppy indeed. But not as sloppy as the Theatre Royal cleaners. The whingers were thrilled to see that they hadn’t bothered to hoover under the sofa leaving a huge pile of fluff among Bloom’s dropped lines.

And £4 for a programme? Andrew – in a rare moment of mathematical lucidity – noted that for a two-hander that works out at £2 per biography. It also contains a couple of dull articles about American dance teacher Arthur Murray and Florida which are printed in such tiny type most of the Haymarket’s elderly audience won’t be able to read. £4 for a tiny glass of wine too. Outrageous.

* A taste of the critical reception:

• “It is mercifully not often that you get to see a play in the West End as remorselessly terrible… we are left staring in open-mouthed astonishment at a train wreck of an evening” Sheridan Morley in the Daily Express
• “Alfieri’s lame writing gives them so little to work with… This play is tooth-rottingly sweet right through to its sickly soft centre. And whatever steps Zane and Bloom essay, it, and the production, remain irretrievably flatfooted.” Sam Marlowe in the Times
• “Terpsichorean taradiddle” Michael Billington in The Guardian