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Hannigan is pernickety, dismayed and several things she’s meant to be
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IMAGINE a Much Ado About Nothing that’s been transposed, complete with a cute Beatrice and a vain Benedick, to a pretty bland section of modern Manhattan. Imagine that, though these two don’t possess anything as extreme as nervous systems and so can’t get on each other’s nerves, they do exchange the odd sideways glance and sign of irritation. Imagine a version of Much Ado without tension either hostile or sexual — and you’ve imagined When Harry Met Sally as played by the one-time teen TV stars, Luke Perry and Alyson Hannigan.
It says much for Marcy Kahan’s adaptation of Nora Ephron’s famous screenplay that the comedy largely survives their attempts to inject it with emotional formaldehyde. The story of Harry, who looks for happiness in casual sex, and Sally, who haplessly craves love, still has its nice lines and amusing encounters. When Sally recalls a suitor who flosses with her hair, or Harry tries to get Sally off with a date who spoils the script by falling for the date Sally has arranged for Harry, you feel Woody Allen has emerged from his eyrie to update Shakespeare.
But the point is that the two spend much of the play disliking each other and most of it not seeing that dislike always masks attraction.
And even when Perry’s young Harry introduces himself to Hannigan’s callow Sally by seductively suggesting that friendship between men and women is impossible, you sense neither emotion. It’s no better when the piece fast-forwards from 1987 to 1992, and he describes the boredom of having to hang around for more than three seconds after finishing sex with a girl. So predictable a plot — and we know from the start what will happen by 2000 — needs conflict, energy, attack: much ado, not what it sometimes gets here, nothing.
True, even if she spends much of Loveday Ingram’s production with hair and heart unmussed, Hannigan is pernickety, dismayed and several things she’s meant to be. And though he overdoes the hand gestures, Perry manages to be boastful and blokeish. But what ought to be a strength, the insertion of filmed interviews with couples who have been married for decades, is actually a problem. It emphasises how little the two performers grow in the course of the evening, how inadequately they demonstrate that love comes from knowing people, not sleeping with them.
And what of the film’s best-known scene, the one where Sally makes ecstatic noises in an eaterie in order to disprove Harry’s belief that women can’t fake orgasm? Yes, it’s there and, yes, it’s still funny.
But the follow-up, here given to a gay man and not a frustrated woman diner, “I’ll have whatever she’s having”, goes for nothing. The story of the evening, really.
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Courtesy of The Times |
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