06 February 2012 (Theatre Review)

Star rating: 2.5/5
Title: Hollywood Valhalla
Venue: Bewley's Café Theatre
Director: Joe Devlin
Cast: Patrick Joseph Byrnes, Stewart Roche

Playwright Aidan Harney makes an interesting attempt to reflect the big issues faced by those infected, or who come in contact, with the AIDS virus. The shame, the panic, the ignorance and fear that it outs in the ill and the ill informed are shown in his imagining of the final days of Rock Hudson, 'the first big time Faggot' to die of the disease. Yet this duologue presented by Bewley's Cafe Theatre (in association with PurpleHeart and The Focus Theatre) feels more like the cliff notes to a moment in history, that errs into melodrama when it should push for answers, indulging in Hollywood hearsay rather than tending to a throbbing human ignorance.

Frail of body and of mind Rock Hudson is plagued by things he thought he forgot. Sustained by the slow trickle of fan mail and the meals brought to him by his supposedly straight, and definitely married, trainer Toby (Roche), memories of lost loves and troubled youth come tumbling back. When Hollywood extends an olive branch, a role on Dynasty, he can taste the former glory. But history has a more pressing sound stage for him to walk onto, allowing Harney to explore the private and public persona's of a closeted icon.

Almost thirty years after his death the questions raised by his coming out, and tackled in this production, can still stop the presses. The responsibility high profile homosexuals owe to their fellow passengers on the S.S. LGBT is on a constant collision course with the personal cost of being 'out'. While the political ramifications of identifying yourself too closely with the pink agenda is a pinch all too familiar to politicians on either side of the Atlantic.

Harney addresses all this in the conversations Hudson has with Toby. Yet his desicion to heavily focus on the marital woes of the latter blunts any originality this production could have possesed. Rather than exploring the thoughts that swamped Hudson's mind as he did the first honest and heroic thing in his life, we get waylayed into cliche, which though important to exploring the delusion, comfort and trappings of the closet, we've heard several times before. Harney would have created a much more powerful and pertinent drama had he focused more firmly on Hudson's struggle to explain, then shed his artifice a choice that lead to him becoming, then changing, the face of AIDS.

The casting of PurpleHearts Artistic Director Stewart Roach as Toby is an asthetic gamble the production fails to pull off. He doesn't look like the type of young, dumb, full of cum trainer that Hudson would have kept around. And the fact that Harney never develops the character beyond a shrieking sounding board to reflect the AIDS panic further hampers this two-hander which would have been better served focusing on the peripheral voices in Hudson's life rather than contriving them all into one.

Director Joe Devlin decorates the piece with torch songs that tenderly support the lonley fight Hudson has faught throughout his life while Harney's poignant riffing on Sunset Boulevard (where Toby helps Hudson prepare for his final close up) is truly touching. There is much to develop here. If he could have stepped away from the laced innuendo and really looked at the cause and effect of Hudson's situation we could have had theatre that serves as more than just a curiosity.

Review by: Caomhan Keane
 

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