London Likes Lemmon, Not ‘Veterans Day’

What has Jack Lemmon been up to lately? He’s been in London, doing a play at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket--Donald Freed’s “Veterans Day.” The critics liked him, mostly hated it.

Lemmon plays a gung-ho used-car salesman and World War II vet who uncovers a presidential-assassination plot in the local veterans’ hospital. Involved are a Vietnam War hero (Michael Gambon) and a mute World War II veteran in a wheelchair (Robert Flemyng).

Most of the critics found Lemmon’s superpatriot salesman a true characterization, not just a spin on Lemmon’s good-guy persona. Nicholas Jongh of the Guardian:

“The character is most unattractive and Lemmon refuses to sentimentalize the man or to temper his unlovely characteristics. (Later) the glibness goes and Lemmon shows the man changing, succumbing to childlike fear and disgust. Lemmon has not quite the pitch of fervor or intensity for the high emotional, but it is a performance of virtuoso finesse and compulsion.”

But De Jongh found Freed’s script both flimsy and ponderous, its anti-war message old news and its plot faintly preposterous. Other critics tended to agree.

The conservative papers were particularly hard on the play, previously performed at the Denver Theatre Center. The Sunday Telegraph’s John Gross called it “a bad joke of a play” and the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker said that its only sign of genius was its ability to corral Lemmon into the cast.

But critics disposed to accept the play’s argument also were disappointed. Michael Billington in the International Herald-Tribune: “At a time when so much American drama is obsessed with domestic crises, it is tempting to raise a cheer for a writer who believes that politics is the stuff of theater. The problem is that Freed’s liberal instincts outpace his dramaturgical gifts.”

Didn’t anyone have anything good to say about “Veterans Day”? Yes. Michael Ratcliffe of the Observer: “It is much more original and less soppy than ‘A Walk in the Woods’ and the players complemented one another superbly.”

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Actress Frances Sternhagen, in Backstage magazine, on the different requirements of screen and stage acting: “You have to project it on the stage, and you have to contain it in films.”