Too Many Variations

French-Canadian actress Francine Racette is clearly a formidable woman. As her husband Donald Sutherland recalls, she tried to convince him back in 1986 to take a French play to New York. He declined, and La Cages Aux Folles became a Broadway smash. So when, two years ago, she asked him to do another French play, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Enigmatic Variations, Sutherland says he dared not refuse.

But the star of films including M*A*S*H and Don't Look Now was unable to find a workable English translation. That's when his son Roeg, still a college student in his mid-20s, mentioned to his mother that he'd translated the play for his studies. She showed his work to his father, and the delighted Donald hired his son as the official translator. After sold-out runs in Los Angeles and Toronto, English producer Duncan Weldon has brought Sutherland senior and the $450,000 production to London's Savoy Theatre, in a new staging by Anthony Page.

Unfortunately, Enigmatic Variations does not quite hang together. A writer, Abel Znorko, who lives on an island, is visited by a journalist, Erik Larsen, who sets out to prove that Znorko's new book about a couple who express their love solely through letters is, despite Larsen's denial, autobiographical.

Schmitt seems determined to rival Elgar's Enigma Variations Znorko's favourite musical work, from which the play derives its title for the sheer volume of slants he can wring from a single theme. In an 80-minute play, that leaves precious little time for character development. This weakness in the work is also reflected in Page's direction, which denies the action any space to breathe.

Much of the writing is genuinely witty, even if Roeg Sutherland's translation sometimes lurches into self-conscious intellectualism. His father is wonderful as Znorko, wearing the cha-racter's pomposity with as much crumpled flamboyance as the purple tie that nestles against his cardigan. He handles the writer's ever-changing moods with aplomb, and might have further disguised the work's flaws had he been paired with a more charismatic performance than John Rubinstein supplies. It takes two to make a double-act, and Rubinstein never suggests the passions that quietly tear at Larsen. Sutherland had originally wanted his friend Christopher Plummer as his co-star; now that might have been something.