It is early evening in the West End of London, and outside the Playhouse Theatre near Charing Cross, couples are rushing from nearby stations fishing tickets from handbags, while others leap from taxis or wait anxiously for friends outside the door.
These are scenes familiar from across the capital’s theatre district, but there is something very different about the audience for this preview performance of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow .
London theatre audiences tend to be predominantly middle aged but the majority of those hurrying to the Playhouse are in their 20s or 30s, some of them even younger, many of them fashionably dressed young women. They do not, for the most part, look like the usual audience for the cerebral Pulitzer prize–winning playwright.
“Oh, Lindsay Lohan is definitely the draw – that’s how I heard about this,” says student Lisanne Stock, who has persuaded her grandmother to bring her to the play as a birthday treat. Commercials producer John Sullivan is here for the same reason – and is hoping for a spectacle. “She either has to be really good or really shit. If she comes on and wins a Tony, fabulous. But if she comes out and vomits on the stage I will give her a standing ovation.”
On Thursday, after a week of previews, the Hollywood star Lindsay Lohan will make her formal debut on the London stage, and theatre critics will finally be able to determine whether the star of Parent Trap and Mean Girls, the woman judged FHM’s 13th sexiest woman in the world in 2006, the fifth most searched internet term of 2012, can also act.
Lohan is far from the first big screen big name to take a whirl on the London stage — Nicole Kidman, Gwyneth Paltrow, Matt Damon and many others have sought to bump up their actorly kudos with a stint in the West End. But there are famous names, and then there is Lohan.
“On the night of the first preview, USA Today listed Lindsay’s appearance as one of the five most important things happening in the world that day,” says the play’s director, Lindsay Posner. “We were just behind the bombing of Syria.”
Posner is a highly experienced theatre director who has worked with actors including Juliette Lewis, Julia Stiles and Matthew Perry, but says he has never experienced anything like it. “Though I can see that Lindsay is completely accustomed to it now.”
Lohan, still only 28, has been a star since she was 11, but no one pretends the flurry of attention around her theatrical debut is down to her acting chops. The former Disney child star has been “troubled” for almost a decade and had her first stint in rehab at 20, the first of at least six in her short life. She received her first of a number of convictions for drink and drug offences in 2007, and confessed later that year to an addiction to both. In recent years the film parts have got smaller and the ignoble headlines splashier, involving court mandated rehab, a number of brief stints in prison and more than one high–profile falling–out with a director blaming her unreliability. Small wonder that some have raised eyebrows at the decision to appoint Lohan – with not a single acting lesson and zero theatrical experience to her name – to a key role in a fast–paced three–hander.
“The West End has a rich history of what you might cynically call stunt casting,” says Theo Bosanquet, online editor of WhatsOnStage.com, though he notes that the role of Karen in Speed-the-Plow – which is, notably, a satire on ambition and exploitation in Hollywood – was originally played on Broadway by Madonna, “so she’s following in ample footsteps for that”.
“Of course [Lohan’s appearance] is a big deal – she’s a huge Hollywood name – though you would probably say infamous rather than famous these days,” says Bosanquet. “But this is the way of the world now. We speak in the currency of celebrity and obviously one of the big ways to put bums on seats is to cast a famous face.”
To his credit, Posner acknowledges that he saw Lohan as a hook to help get the play attention, “because that’s the way it is”. But the director, behind a number of Mamet productions, insists that when he first heard Lohan had moved to London in the spring, “I thought, actually, she’s dead right for the part, if she’s in the right state of mind to do a play”.
That was, perhaps, a big if. There were some who considered Lohan effectively unemployable after the reported troubles of some of her recent film productions, though Posner says: “There’s never been a problem of that nature, and in terms of Lindsay’s illness and her addiction, I’m pretty certain she’s properly in recovery – in fact I know she is because there’s been no evidence of that whatsoever.”
For the actor, indeed, there has been a decided air of eagerness to prove that this time, things can be very different. “I’m at a point where I want a diligent routine and I really want to get back into work,” she told Time Out last month. “People have certain perceptions of me and I wanted to change them … I’m hoping it’ll take away attention from me as a celebrity name and draw attention to the fact that I’m an actress.”
Certainly Lohan has a great deal of baggage to dsipose of. She fled LA for New York last year in a bid to shake off bad influences (at which point a note she had written in therapy, listing 36 mostly famous names she had allegedly slept with, was leaked to the press). New York was supposed to offer a new start but she said she became “overwhelmed” there after agreeing to a reality TV show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN network.
And so, in March, she moved to London, saying with a touching earnestness, “It feels really good to turn on the TV and not everything to be about gossip.” She has found “a great place. It’s very light and I feel safe”, and posts daily pictures on her Instagram account of what at times could almost look like the life of any other moneyed young west London girl – lunching with friends in Mayfair, taking in a Kylie Minogue concert (“I love being happy with good people”), posing for selfies in designer clobber.
The tabloids have attempted to cast her as the unrepentant party girl still stumbling out of celeb hot spot Chiltern Firehouse in Marylebone, but as she said last week, “The thing I really like about [London] is that things do close at normal times here. It’s nice to have no choice but to shut down.”
Posner says: “I think she’s a very lovely, generous girl who was very very keen to be directed.”Posner, who also cast West Wing actor Richard Schiff and the British stage and TV actor Nigel Lindsay (the third Lindsay in the production) for Speed-the-Plow.
“There’s no side to her. I’ve had prima donna behaviour from actors in the past and there’s none of that from Lindsay.” He was surprised, “how quickly Lindsay was able to give the impression that she has worked on the stage before. Especially vocally. She’s naturally got a very big voice. I’m not even sure she knew that.” And yet, as the influential theatre blog West End Whingers noted in a review of a preview performance earlier this week, “Everyone was expecting (or hoping for) a car crash”.
Even before the actors were in rehearsal, there were fabricated reports that Lohan was failing to turn up and Posner had given her a final warning or that she had even been spotted running naked through Selfridges (“just a complete lie”). Breathless reports of the first night of previews – when any production will be ironing out its problems and even the most experienced stage actor can struggle, insists Posner – mentioned that Lohan needed repeated prompts to remember her lines. The bookmaker Ladbrokes immediately offered odds of 2 – 1 on Lohan being sacked.
So – how good is she? “Not exactly the comeback she was looking for!” reported the Daily Mail of her first appearance onstage, saying that “while not an unmitigated disaster” the actor seemed not to know her lines and to be reading from a book while “her one main passionate speech only succeeded in causing the audience to burst into laughter”.
Bosanquet says: “She was clearly a long way off from being ready on the first night, but that’s not to say that she won’t be ready. Previews are when changes get made, when mistakes get made. The benefit of the doubt should be given until she has had a chance.” Others, in any case, were considerably more impressed.
“She was fine,” noted the West End Whingers. “No, she was more than fine. She’s actually pretty damn good with unexpected stage presence.”
On Thursday night the newspaper critics – who may yet make or break the play – will have their say. For Lohan, too, there is much at stake. This play, she has said, “helps with the perception that I’m just a psycho that goes out and stuff. I’ve done things, but people grow up and they change. I’m willing to work hard to gain back the respect that I once had and have lost.”
Mark Lawson: Speed-the-Plow has the perfect role for Lindsay Lohan
Mean Girls or David Mamet? - quiz
Fetch or flop? Lindsay Lohan in Speed-the-Plow – in pictures
