Smoking with Lulu

Observer (11Jan01): Smoking With Lulu brings to dramatic life the New Yorker profile that Ken Tynan wrote about Louise Brooks 40 years after she'd made her last movie. When they met, Brooks was in her seventies, bedridden with osteoarthritis and emphysema. Tynan was 51, a torrent of opinion, evocation and wordplay he was also a stammerer: 'You hardly notice it when I write.' He was to die six years later - of emphysema. The play scores as a sketch of what it is to feel glamorous, and threatened. [Thelma Barlow], once Mavis in Coronation Street, makes the most unlikely career change since Shirley Temple became an ambassador. She's always enticing and intelligent, but not yet hard-boiled enough for the wilful talent who wanted to be a 'writer's moll'. It's [Peter Eyre] who provides the crucial moment of the evening when he appears, puffing on a cigarette, glowering down a nose that he seems eerily to have elongated for the occasion, and discoursing fluently, with little breaks for a stammer, on the allure of the burning stick which ends up as ash. Just as you're deciding whether to write this up as brilliance or off as pretentiousness, he pauses, and nods: 'I'm creating... atmosphere.' At its best, that's what Smoking With Lulu supplies.