Whatever I expected from The Prisoner of Second Avenue, it certainly wasn’t what I got.  This New York comedy seemed a fair candidate for enjoyableness; it certainly has an impeccable pedigree, having been written by Woody Allen’s old mucker, The Odd Couple playwright Neil Simon.  What’s more, in its 1971 Broadway incarnation this play starred Peter Falk (aka Columbo!), and in 1975 it was made into a film featuring Jack Lemmon and Anne Bancroft.  That is possibly a difficult lineage for the Vaudeville Theatre to live up to, even when its audience can safely be assumed to be in the grip of Goldblumschönheitslust. 

Briefly: Mel Edison, played by Goldblum, loses his job as a result of the economic downturn and is stricken by a nervous breakdown which is variously marked by insomnia, a sudden distaste for material possessions, and a murderous vision of burying his upstairs neighbour in a snowdrift (it’s a heatwave summer when the play opens).  Edna Edison, played by Mercedes Ruehl, comforts her husband, goes out to work in his stead, vies with Mel’s four siblings for caretaking duty, briefly succumbs to the strain, and ultimately goes to Mel for succour which he is suddenly, miraculously, able to provide again.

Now, as many critics of this play have observed, Goldblum cannot be faulted as an exponent of physical comedy: he makes perfect use of facial expression, gesture, his own height and leanness, and altogether cuts an extremely sympathetic figure, not to mention quite a dash.  Ruehl on the other hand, who I hear is a wonderful actress, comes over in this play as a bewildering hybrid of haughtiness and housewifery.  It is as if some Frankenstein had cruelly tried to meld the post-Botox Stockard Channing into another Edna, namely Edna Turnblad as played by John Travolta in the recent remake of Hairspray. I was depressed by this play.  Its recessionary topicality, which someone must have thought occasioned the revival, served only to sap the comedy from the funny bits and render the serious bits excruciatingly, because so anomalously, sad.  The between-scene interpolations of “news footage” from early Seventies New York, covering shootings and robberies by the starving unemployed, are neither funny nor clever; and nothing is more tonally inappropriate than the moment where Edna squeezes Mel tight and begs him, ‘Please don’t get sick and die!  I don’t want to stay here without you.’ 

It does not need saying that comedy and tragedy are conceptually close: The Prisoner of Second Avenue could hardly be faulted for being both humorous and sombre.  But what is striking about this play – and it bites harder, perhaps, in straitened times – is that Mel and Edna’s sorrows are not of their making, or even of Neil Simon’s making; that their and their country’s sorrows extend well beyond the limited remit of this or any playwright; that there are serious things going on which only time will mend.  That is an intrinsically tragic thought, no matter how much howling and gesticulating is done to counter it; some upsetting truths are conjured up, but woefully mishandled, by this less-than-comic Prisoner of Second Avenue.