In Rob Ashford’s staging of Jay Presson Allen’s almost-monologue, the audience is seated around a sumptuous evocation of the writer and social gadfly’s overstuffed New York apartment.
asserted
audience → seat → apartment
We’re fleetingly acknowledged as he gossips and kvetches on the phone or into a tape recorder for his biographer.
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he → acknowledge → biographer
He’s haunted by The Swan (Charlotte d’Amboise), a lean and chiffon-skirted avatar of the wealthy society women he befriended and has just betrayed, in a 1975 Esquire excerpt of his never-finished tell-all novel.
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he → haunt → novel
This is an extremely clumsy device, but it does mean the programme carries a delicious credit for a “standby swan”.
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programme → mean → swan
Allen’s play, written in 1991, is a none-too-subtle example of the tendency of America’s elites and American showbiz endlessly to mythologise and re-devour themselves, an orgy of name-dropping and snobbery.
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play → write → dropping
It charts Capote’s rise as an unloved but precocious child of a divorcee in Monroeville, Alabama, to literary stardom that bought him entry to Manhattan’s haute monde.
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that → chart → monde
It also notes the destructive impulse in a writer’s life, which led “Tru” to detonate relationships on and off the page, and addle himself with alcohol and other intoxicants.
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which → note → alcohol
Ferguson, slouching and perma-hungover in a racoon coat and white hat, looks little like Capote, who resembled a white-blond, moon-faced, devil child.
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who → slouch → child
But he captures his insinuating, conspiratorial prattle and his vaunting self-belief.
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he → capture → prattle
The actor, who has been making a second home on the London stage latterly, in Stephen Sondheim’s Here We Are and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, almost made me forget how much I dislike soliloquies where a famous character reels off all the touchpoints of his or her life.
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character → make → life
Still, if we’re going to have such a show, Capote (“Cap-OH-dee,” he fussily corrects one interlocutor) offers abundant material.
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he → go → material
“I’ve lived an extraordinary life and I knew everyone,” he declares early on, and he’s right.
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he → live → everyone
Tru supposedly tap-danced with Louis Armstrong, knew RFK and JFK *and* their killers, and goes disco dancing on cocaine with Ava Gardner at Studio 54.
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Tru → dance → Studio
He could master a Maserati, was a crack shot, could read upside down - or so he claims.
uncertain
he → master → Maserati
His homosexuality was “always right out there” at a time when this was brave, and he maintained a non-exclusive relationship with his lover Jack Dunphy for three decades.
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he → maintain → decades
(If you find yourself in the front row of Tru’s salon here, you may be flirted with.)
uncertain
you → find → salon
The early literary landmarks of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood are namechecked, of course, along with the now-legendary Black and White Ball he hosted at NY’s Plaza Hotel in 1966.
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he → namechecke → 1966
The implication is that Tru squandered his true talent as a novelist and a pioneer of the New Journalism for parties and fripperies.
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Tru → squander → parties
He seethes here at being blackballed and he’s fussy about objects and décor.
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he → seethe → objects
The play takes place just before Christmas and quite a lot of comedy is wrung from Capote’s horror at the “veritable horse-trough of unspeakable poinsettias” he’s been sent.
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he → take → poinsettias
Presson Allen, whose credits include the dramatisation and screenplay of The Prime of Miss Jean Broadie and the filmscript for Cabaret, captures Capote’s way with a gimlet one-liner.
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credits → include → liner
“I went to Staten Island once,” he marvels, amid a roll-call of his travels.
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he → go → travels
For every year spent in California “you lose 30 points off your IQ”.
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you → spend → IQ
But the narrative is aimless, descending into moony reminiscences of Tru’s childhood friendship with his aunt, the time he first got drunk at seven and was bitten by a cottonmouth snake aged eight.
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he → descend → snake
Charlotte d’Amboise’s Swan, who has had little to do but flash her legs and scapulae, and don and doff a carnival mask and a beaded top that looks like a carbonised ribcage, is enlisted to waltz him awkwardly off the stage.
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that → have → stage
We, in turn, go out whistling the set.
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We → go → set
The Aporia
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