Just a little too art-house for its own good? Prism, Hampstead Theatre, review
“I don’t like old films!” This blunt assertion comes, tactlessly, from Lucy, the young carer taken on as home-help for an ageing, dementia-stricken Jack Cardiff in Terry Johnson’s fictionalised tribute to the lauded English cinematographer (1914-2009).
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“You don’t watch old films?” her affable patient retorts, displaying a flash of lucidity, incredulity and irritability. “Some of them are really long. And they don’t fit the telly,” she continues. What an impertinence!
Laurence Olivier, signing Cardiff up for The Prince and The Showgirl (in which he starred opposite Marilyn Monroe), hailed him as “the best cameraman in the world”. Martin Scorsese in a foreword to the 1996 memoir we see being sporadically dictated, and laboriously typed, hailed Cardiff for making “cinema into an art of moving painting”. He got an Oscar for Black Narcissus (1947). Mind you, if you asked most people to rattle off Cardiff’s distinguished CV, I suspect the ignoramuses would far outnumber the buffs.
Prism serves as a welcome enough primer, then (for the under-informed likes of me, at any rate), to a body of work, and the mechanics under-pinning it, that form part of cinema’s golden-age. When Robert Lindsay’s concertedly serene, quietly agitated Jack holds up the refractive optical marvel that was a key component of his adventures in colour – “God’s eyeball” – it’s hard not to feel a frisson of wonder.
Our response to the way the domestic scene that greets him in his converted, memorabilia-crammed Buckinghamshire garage is twisted by his diseased mind into memories of yore is more complex, however. Johnson invites some hesitant laughter as Cardiff talks funny, imagines his local boozer has gone missing and fleetingly confuses his carer with Monroe and his son with Arthur Miller, reliving old conversations. Yet the piece is suffused with real pain, the family torn between despair and indulgence. Cardiff woos his wife, mistaking her for Katharine Hepburn, but it smells like betrayal – he seems to have become smitten with the star during the filming of The African Queen, shot in notoriously hellish conditions up river in a remote stretch of the Belgian Congo.
At its best, especially in the pacier second half (Johnson directs), where those fly-blown days on a raft in the middle of “Beyondo”, as the region was called, are evoked – with Bogart and Bacall brought to wryly complaining life too – Prism draws us into a landscape of mental confusion, with the actors doubling, even tripling roles. Robert Lindsay carries the main burden of our attention with understated flair, lending shades of Archie Rice from The Entertainer whenever Cardiff, a bit of an old-charmer, recalls his vaudevillian roots. Claire Skinner is very fine too as his forgotten wife. Yet overall the piece lacks the intensity of focus and emotion of The Father, Florian Zeller’s gripping recent portrait of neurological disintegration.
I found myself wishing for a touch more multiplex, less in the way of art-house from the script: a simpler, more comprehensive overview of Cardiff’s remarkable career. All told, accomplished though this is, I suspect it might work best on telly.
Until Oct 14. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com