Rainman

Riflemind

Hollywood’s love affair with the London stage continues, as Josh Hartnett (Black Hawk Down, Sin City and so on) stars in a new version of Rain Man at the Apollo and Philip Seymour Hoffman directs a new play, Riflemind, at the Trafalgar Studios.

Rain Man’s movie provenance means plenty of twists and turns and a gripping, if melodramatic and occasionally sentimental, plot. Callous car salesman Charlie Babbitt learns that his father has died, leaving his $12m fortune to an unnamed beneficiary. This beneficiary, it turns out, is a brother he never knew he had, Raymond. And Raymond is not just autistic - “a f***ing retard”, in Charlie’s delightful phrasing - but an autistic savant. He can memorise telephone directories. “It’s an extremely rare condition,” says his doctor. Right.

Raymond is gentle and sweet-natured, while all the “normal” characters here tend to be the opposite: dangerous echoes of The Fast Show’s brilliant parody of the wheelchair movie, I Lurve You, Cute Disabled Guy. As Charlie, Hartnett talks ferociously fast: inevitably, he sometimes stumbles, but you admire him for trying and mostly getting it right. He dominates the stage like a true Hollywood alpha male, wound up taut with bitterness and sometimes positively threatening - his icy emotional distance from the rest of the world as crippling as his autistic brother’s.

As Raymond, Adam Godley shuffles about awkwardly, clacking his skinny white fingers as if he’s playing invisible castanets. Any threat to his minutely ordered routine sends him into total tailspin panic, slapping his head like a deranged chimp. And we get a sudden, shocking sense of his condition when he recalls that his mother died and Olivia Newton-John topped the charts with Physical on the same date: both are simply facts to him, flatly stated before he turns away to gaze back into his own impenetrable world.

We laugh, too: not at Raymond, but at Charlie’s mounting frustration. By the end, though, Charlie has begun to learn something like brotherly love - a wholly new experience for him, as Hartnett’s increasingly complex performance suggests - while Raymond hints at some capacity for emotional attachment, reaching out for Charlie’s hand in a moment of eloquent simplicity. There is no miracle cure for autism, and nothing suggests there might be, but with time and patience, changes can happen.

Highlights are the brothers’ slow dance against the spectacular illuminated cityscape of Las Vegas by night, breathtakingly beautiful in all its blazing, global-warming gaudiness; and the point when the Raymond/Rain Man connection is finally made and they stand staring at each other, in slowly dawning recognition, across the abyss of their lonely, half-forgotten boyhoods. It’s a deeply moving scene, and confirms that Dan Gordon’s skilful stage adaptation was most certainly worthwhile.

Sitting through Riflemind, on the other hand, means nearly three gruelling hours of stifling your yawns and examining your conscience. Because you must have done something terrible to deserve this kind of punishment.

The writer is Andrew Upton, for ever doomed to be known as “Mr Cate Blanchett”. (Mind you, I can think of a few perks of the job, too.) Upton was responsible for a highly praised adaptation of Gorky’s Philistines at the National Theatre recently. The play is directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman and its star is John Hannah.

The anorexic plot centres on the reunion of a rock band, Riflemind, at the home of the lead singer, John (Hannah), who now lives in a state of yogic grace and Evian-sipping purity with his wife, Lynn. The ghosts of the past soon rise again, as the band’s members squabble and squawk, glug vodka and smoke smack. Do we care? Not one of them is remotely interesting or appealing; all are graduates of the Liam Gallagher School of Charm, their interminable, solipsistic maunder-ings making about as much sense as Ozzy Osbourne in full flow.

There is a slightly comical bonking scene, and at one point Lynn pees in the fridge. As with most pees, however, you’d rather not wait three hours for it. Whatever John’s drug of choice in his heyday, as Hannah plays him it appears to be some powerful form of horse tranquilliser. And Seymour Hoffman’s direction looks like that of a man who has never directed for the stage before in his life (though he has), but thinks he has nothing more to learn about it (though he has). All you really notice about it is its clumsiness.

We’re told that Riflemind once played to audiences of 50,000, though it’s hard to imagine how a group this charisma-free could hold the attention of a dozen drunks in a pub in Finsbury Park. Comparison with other similar efforts only makes things worse, whether it’s last year’s hilarious, vitriol-fuelled The Dysfunckshonalz! at the Bush Theatre or even This Is Spinal Tap.

No doubt the almost mythical trajectory of the rock star’s career, from brief, brilliant success to burnout, from Sid Vicious to Kurt Cobain to Pete Doherty, could offer us a powerful metaphor for our times. But not here.

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