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THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE
Royal Court
Watching The Kid Stays In The
Picture is a bit like reading a book
whose pages you’re reluctant to turn
because you never want it to end. From
the moment it begins, its inexhaustible
pleasure quotient kicks in and for the
next two and a half hours or so you’re
on a roller-coaster ride from which you
never want to disembark.
Of course, it helps to be a movie buff
given that the protagonist of this
cautionary tale is one-time Hollywood
heavy-weight Robert Evans on whose
racy, no-holds-barred 1994 memoir,
thrillingly adapted by director Simon
McBurney and James Yeatman, it is
based.
Born in New York in 1930 to second
generation Jews from the Upper West
Side, he was, at the age of 26, famously
spotted poolside at the Beverly Hills
Hotel by the actress Norma Shearer, wife
of the late, ‘wunderkind’ producer Irving
Thalberg.
It just so happened that a film about
silent star Lon Chaney called The Man of a
Thousand Faces in which Thalberg would
play a significant role, was in preproduction
at the time and Shearer thought
that the good-looking, charismatic Evans
would be great in the part. He wasn’t. The
New York Times called his performance
‘unspeakably poor’.
Heather Burns and Ajay Naidu.
Evans’s lack of talent, however, didn’t
stop studio head Darryl F. Zanuck
casting him as a Spanish matador
opposite Tyrone Power, Errol Flynn and
Ava Gardner in Hemingway’s The Sun
Also Rises. With the exception of Flynn,
the cast ganged up on him and wanted
him fired. But not Zanuck. ‘The kid stays
in the picture!’, he famously said, and
he did.
Evans, however, was no fool; he knew
he was a lousy actor. What really turned
him on wasn’t stardom but the kind of
power Zanuck had demonstrated. He
wanted to be the one to demand that ‘the
kid stays in the picture!’
A combination of luck, aggression,
determination and cultivating the right
people soon fast-tracked him to
Paramount Pictures where, against all
the odds he became head of the studio,
the youngest person ever to do so.
Catapulting both himself and
Paramount to the top of the charts were
several era-defining hits such as Love
Story, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and
most notably The Godfather, whose
initial script by Francis Ford Coppola he
rejected as lacking the gravitas and
complexity the subject demanded.
Inevitably Evans’s celebrity, his
wealth, his excessive life-style and his
womanising (he was married seven
times, though McBurney and Yeatman
underplay the marriages) caught up with
Photo: Johan Persson.
him. Apart from the catastrophic and
costly failure of The Cotton Club (1984)
his most damaging fall from grace was
his questionable involvement with a
drugs transaction and a murder in which
he was marginally implicated.
It was a seriously bad time for
Hollywood’s erstwhile wonder boy, who,
in the aftermath of failure and drugabuse
suffered several strokes.
But to paraphrase a Sondheim lyric,
Evans had seen it all yet he’s still here –
alive at age 86, if not exactly kicking.
Thanks to the generosity of his friend Jack
Nicolson, he’s back in the Hollywood
manse he so loved but was forced to sell
to pay his accumulating debts.
Mc Burney and his Complicité
company recreate Evans’s heady, selfdestructive
life through the effective use
of multimedia techniques in which stills,
film footage – both live and from their
original sources – are projected onto the
black screen that dominates Anna
Fleischle’s striking, all-purpose set. The
atmospheric noir-like lighting design is
by Paul Anderson and it’s terrific.
Pete Malkin’s sound effects,
especially the insistent use of rapid-fire
telephone conversations, provide an
urgency to the text; while bringing it all
to life is a brilliant cast of eight who
perform a multiplicity of roles.
Though the programme does not
identify exactly who plays who, the three
stages in Evans’s turbulent life – youth,
middle and old age – are respectively
shared by Heather Burns, Christian
Carmargo and Danny Huston, son of the
great John Huston.
Talking of which, name-dropping, on
this occasion, is mandatory, with some
wonderfully entertaining appearances
from Marlon Brando, Henry Kissinger,
Francis Coppola, Ernest Hemingway, Ali
McGraw (representing Evans’s wives)
and James Cagney, to name just a few.
If ever a show had the Wow! factor –
it’s The Kid Stays in the Picture. I’d say
don’t miss it, but the entire run is
virtually sold-out.
CLIVE HIRSCHHORN
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