MOVIE REVIEW : Hacked-Up Adaptation Fails to Make ‘Chorus’ a Cut Above

Scarborough, the English coastal resort city that is the setting of “A Chorus of Disapproval” (Music Hall and Esquire)--and also the home of its writer, Alan Ayckbourn--looks a lovely, eccentric place. Cold cliffs sweep to a paved esplanade, and the town is full of hilly streets that wind up between gingerbread houses, dingy pubs and Victorian hotels. In such a town, Alec Guinness, in a fey ‘50s comedy, might have wandered bemusedly, lamb to the slaughter for the flamboyant zanies inside.

Instead of Guinness, this hacked-up adaptation of Ayckbourn’s wry play has Jeremy Irons, playing the befogged Guy Jones, haplessly seeking companionship in a Scarborough community production of “The Beggar’s Opera.”

Guy is right: The theater is the place to meet people, the place where wallflowers become femme s fatales , wimps become superstuds. Though he has the aggressiveness of a lily pad and the sexual smolder of a pressed tweed suit, he soon tumbles into one adulterous amour with the director’s neglected wife, Hannah (Prunella Scales, of “Fawlty Towers”), and another with voracious Fay (Jenny Seagrove), a woman who pumps undreamed-of lascivious metaphor into the word veal .

Like many amateur groups, this one is riddled with good intentions, high hamminess and sexual intrigue. The director, Dafydd Ap Llewellyn (Anthony Hopkins), is a temperamental tyrant: a sentimental Welsh lawyer who throws tantrums with geyser regularity and seems less concerned with hearing the actors than playing to them, springboards for his weird, dreamy malice.

But instead of a Robert Hamer or an Alexander Mackendrick--a director in tune with classic British movie comedy--to handle all this, “Chorus” has producer-director Michael Winner. Like Jack the Ripper, Winner has a crucial flaw: He likes to cut.

From “I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘is Name” to “Death Wish I, II and III,” Winner has never been a man to shoot one set-up when seven will do. And Ayckbourn’s humor depends on keeping his characters within a habitable universe, letting the action grow organically around them.

There’s not a bad actor in the cast but barely a complete performance. Seagrove has a nice, brittle lewdness, but Winner’s camera seems so transfixed by her derriere, he reverses strategy and holds her shots too long. Irons is such a limp Guy that he seems capable of dribbling into the crannies.

As Dafydd, the play’s great part, Hopkins gives his most contorted performance since the Hunchback of Notre Dame, whose posture he almost duplicates. Scrunched-up, stiff-shouldered, roaring, whispering, rasping, Dafydd is a piece of spiced ham, burnt to a crisp. His melancholy eyes pop at you out of the charred lines.

It’s a shame that Winner the producer--who’s assembled a splendid cast, fine script and locations--is so ill-served by Winner the director, who treats the play’s wit like salami thrown into the slicer of his movieola. He’s as shameless as Guy fingering his drawers. The material suggests the deft whimsy of “The Man in the White Suit” or “Tight Little Island.” But the execution is just that: a slaughter. Winner keeps chopping off the heads of his scenes, battle-axing his actors. Behind every Ayckbourn on-target mal mot you can practically hear a directorial growl: “Arf a mo’, mate. I like to cut!”