Frankie and Johnny

Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune Tender, intimate performances highlight Middle Ground Theatre’s Frankie and Johnny. Tension builds between the two characters as they make love, talk and argue through the small hours following their Saturday night at the movies. Kelly McGillis and Rolf Saxon, were ideally cast as the fortyish lovers discovering themselves on a first date in Frankie’s small apartment in west 50’s New York. Both characters have suffered in previous relationships: Frankie abused by a man who left physical and emotional scars and Johnny abandoned by his wife for a crew-cut insurance salesman with a large property in fashionable up-state New York. Johnny tells of visiting his children and of his sense of shame at his material and sexual failure while Frankie nurses her inability to have children as a result of her affair, and tells of other one-night stands. Gradually the two discover what they have in common including coincidental childhoods in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The emotional to and fro builds as Johnny, sure that she’s ‘the one’, courts Frankie but meets the wall of her fears and inhibitions. She is unwilling to be railroaded into a relationship that may turn out like all the others. Anger erupts, sincerity shines through and tenderness blossoms as they share the beauty of the moon across the New York skyline. Stage direction of the two US trained actors is taut and sensitive to both text and performer. Music plays a not inconsiderable part in the play’s background – we open to Bach’s Goldberg Variations played by Glenn Gould on the all-night radio show and later hear Debussy’s Clair de Lune, dedicated to the lovers. Act Two begins with Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and the play closes with the lovers together at dawn and a reprise of Clair de Lune. One quibble: why is the music so muted that we can hardly hear it at all? The set effectively realises Frankie’s cramped apartment but the surrounding acutely angled skyscrapers and other recognisable New York buildings diminish the emotional intensity of the piece; they looked cluttered and untidy as well as distracting to the eye. The moon was static throughout the night, although clouds scudded by. The director’s skill covered some of the gaps, oddities and concerns raised by the script. Yet we wondered what Frankie’s lover had done to her that she could never have children and were surprised at her unconcern at Johnny’s admission that he had done two years in the pen for fraud. While the latter is not a physically threatening offence it certainly should raises alarm bells as far as honesty and trust in a personal relationship are concerned. Frankie and Johnny sadly, did not have the same drawing power as last year’s offering from Middle Ground, Billy Liar. In fact this play has much to offer a twenty-first century audience and proved a rewarding evening in the theatre for those of us who were there on Wednesday night.

David Farrell, Hereford