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Dancing lessons lead to resolution
SIX DAYS AND SEVEN LESSONS
The Haymarket
AT 75, Claire Bloom can look back on fine achievements in TV, film, and the stage.
She held her own alongside Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, and John Gielgud, from Shakespeare to Ibsen.
Her Charlie Chaplin fixation is textbook Freud. In this two-hander by Richard Alfieri, she’s lost none of her well-honed skills of engagement, be it with the audience or with Billy Zane, her co-star, who she hires as her dance teacher. Think Arthur Murray or Victor Silvester.
She is Lily, the wife of a Baptist minister, living like so many seniors in a lower-middle class condo within St Petersburg beach, Florida.
Zane is Michael, an armour-plated gay, ex-New York – gags, camp, dropping one liners.
He comes at $50 a lesson and dresses appropriately, to suit the period and dance or the mood. He persuades her to do the same, from swing to the tango to contemporary dance.
The dance is, by the way, staged by Craig Revel Horwood, one of the stricter judges of television’s Strictly Come Dancing.
And it is through this mechanism that the true story of these two lonely, damaged people gradually unfolds and resolves itself. Zane’s initial combative encounters with his difficult pupil are the stuff of the confrontation between old and young, but it becomes a quiet plea for honesty and a rewarding friendship, however unlikely.
Of course there’s always a danger of sentimentality, but in the firm hands of Bloom and Zane, it has the hard ring of truth, plus the pleasing gentleness of mutual happiness and trust.
“The nice Jewish girl from Finchley,” as she has been described, has stirred passions off the stage as well, but here her Lily is taking a last stab at life and surrendering to it, and as the fine actress she is, obviously enjoying it.
It is to be filmed later next year. I would go a long way to see Bloom and the very versatile Zane again. Touching, moving, and a relevant episode on modern life.
Until Mar 3
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