The Hotel in Amsterdam, a CurtainUp London review

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A CurtainUp London Review
The Hotel in Amsterdam
by Lizzie Loveridge

You know what I think? People who need people are the ghastliest people in the world.
--- Annie

Tom Hollander as Laurie
(Photo: Nobby Clark)

John Osborne's rarely performed 1968 play The Hotel in Amsterdam about a truanting group of film industry executives on a weekend "jolly" has a brilliant revival at the Donmar Warehouse under the skilled direction of Robin Lefèvre. There may be question marks about the depth of Osborne's play but none hover over Lefevre's sparkling production and Tom Hollander's satisfying performance.

While 1968 was known for Hippies and Flower people, protests against the war in Vietnam and the Europe wide student revolutions, film scriptwriter Laurie (Tom Hollander) organises a mini-protest of his own. He and several key workers and their partners have bunked off to Amsterdam for the weekend without telling their control freak boss, known only by his initials, KL, where they were going. (An almost impossible feat since the advent of the cell phone.) KL's dutiful Secretary Amy (Selina Griffiths) is there with her artist husband Dan (Adrian Bower), Gus, the film editor (Anthony Calf) and his girlfriend Annie (Olivia Williams) and Margaret (Susannah Harker), Laurie's preganant wife make up the sextet. The play follows the events of the alcohol fuelled weekend.

Laurie, the writer and Osborne's likeable anti-hero, expresses many of the concerns of his profession. He owns up to the leech-like nature of writers, "you trade on the talent, the kindliness, the forbearance of your friends". His diatribe against KL "dinosaur film produccer" in particular, (said in the programme to be based on real life director Tony Richardson) and the film industry in general, is overflowing with wit and venom. Laurie is presumably Osborne's mouthpiece and reminded me of, but predates, Tom Stoppard's character, Henry in The Real Thing. Laurie's speeches lampoon his good natured but less bright, friend Gus. His humour is a study in political incorrectness, playing on Gus' all male public school background with rumoured links to homosexuality. A repeated theme of Laurie's is the fictional airline El Fag with its job opportunities for gays or the sobbing, menstruating women pilots with Russian airlines - according to Osborne the only employer of women pilots in 1968 - which reduces the men to tearful mirth.

Tom Hollander, still sporting the beard he adopted as King George V in Poliakoff's television drama The Lost Prince, dazzles with his delivery of Osborne's funniest lines. Laurie is the showman of the group. Susannah Harker, as his pretty wife, blinks from behind her large false eyelashes, like a model of wide eyed Sixties "Twigginess" except for her "bump" and her need to lie down a lot. Olivia Williams' enigmatic Annie laughs a little too enthusiastically at Laurie's jokes but then they are nursing an unexpressed, simmering sexual fascination with each other. Serial monogamy seems to be the order of the day rather than extra marital affairs but then maybe they are right, the 1960s didn't really happen until the 1970s.

Hotel in Amsterdam is set in an authentic looking hotel suite with op art sofas and large Dutch art prints on the wall. The cast are beautifully dressed in the period, the women made up with pale faces and lashings of eyeliner.

As a play, it does little more than to express the complaining of writers and to give a picture of the hedonism of the 1960s. But as a production, it does this very, very well. The ending assisted by the arrival of Margaret's disaster prone sister Gillian (Laura Howard) feels contrived, melodramatic and I think would have benefited from a rewrite as they slink back home like naughty children caught doing something they shouldn't have.

The Hotel in Amsterdam
Written by John Osborne
Directed by Robin Lefèvre

Starring: Tom Hollander, Olivia Williams, Susannah Harker
With: Alex Beckett, Anthony Calf, Selina Griffiths, Adrian Bower, Darri Ingolfsson, Laura Howard
Designer: Liz Ascroft
Lighting Designer: Mick Hughes
Running time: Two hours 15 minutes with one interval.
Box Office: 0870 060 6624
Booking to 15th November 2003.
Reviewed by Lizzie Loveridge based on 18th September 2003 Performance at the Donmar Warehouse, Earlham Street, London WC2 (Tube Station: Covent Garden)