This evening's show is Dan Gordon's adaptation of the 1988 movie starring Tom Cruise as a self obsessed con-man Charlie Babbitt who goes to his estranged father's funeral in Cincinatti, Ohio, to find he's been left with a lovely 1949 Buick and a rosebush. The $12million fortune has instead passed to Charlie's older autistic brother Raymond played by Dustin Hoffman. Feeling cheated and intending to gain custody of Raymond and therefore access to the Babbitt fortune, Charlie abducts his brother from his care home and takes him back to Los Angeles. Thus ensues a road trip (Ray won't fly) in which Charlie starts to realise the importance of loyalty and love over money.
Director Robin Herford took a lot of risks in this production, such as casting an actor best known as Tony from Men Behaving Badly as Raymond Babbitt. Neil Morrissey made a brave attempt at this role; not only was he in the shadow of Dustin Hoffman's outstanding performance in the 1988 film, but must also have been aware that many people in the audience, myself included, will have first hand experience of autism and will be watching him very closely. I found Morrissey a little inconsistent. He portrayed Ray's anxiety at being shouted at and panic at being touched very well, but also seemed keen to get a laugh out of Ray's autistic obsessions. When he lists air disasters to show Charlie that he's scared of flying, Ray gets hysterical and starts shouting about terrorists and Osama Bin Laden, and I felt this was irrelevant to the story and a cheap way to get a laugh out of the crazy guy who doesn't know what he's saying.
However, Ray is just one part of this story, the other being Oliver Chris' Charlie Babbitt, who was fantastic and certainly propped up Morrissey's Ray. By the interval the audience thoroughly hates him, and yet when the curtain falls you are almost crying. There are several snappy exchanges between the brothers lifted straight from Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass' original screenplay that are very well used and successfully give the idea that Charlie is no where near Ray's plane of thought; most memorable is the point where Charlie is arguing with his girlfriend and shouts "I'm not using him! Am I using you, Ray?" to which Ray responds with his usual "Yeah". Chris flawlessly portrays the clash of frustration and confusion with love and devotion that every carer goes through every day. All this emotion is shown in the scene when Charlie teaches Ray to dance in Las Vegas. Despite being gruff, sleazy and awkward, we start to see an inkling of affection in Charlie that helps to forgive all his mistreatment of Ray.
Herford and his adapting playwright Dan Gordon seemed keen to faithfully recreate the film, yet in this recreation the production sometimes stumbles. We find out very early on that Ray memorises lists and whole sequences from TV, and repeats an obscure vaudeville sketch called 'Who's On First' when he gets nervous. It seemed awkward that Dan Gordon chose to retain 'Who's On First', but replaced some of Ray's favourite TV shows like Wapner with Judge Judy. Though Gordon is clearly trying to show that Ray's story could be as much one of 2009 as it was of 1988, the references seemed clumsy. The stage is divided by movable screens, and while it's certainly effective in resetting the stage, the colours and affect they have seem very eighties.
To conclude then, this show very nearly hit the nail on the head. The balance between the brothers was spot on, and if I found that Morrissey's portrayal of autism was sometimes, for lack of a better word, theatrical, it was probably due more to my over-exposure to autism rather than any defect in Morrissey's understanding. The only negative point is that I would like to have seen Dan Gordon either stick rigidly to the cultural setting of the film, or shift the whole story to modern day Britain; if it was the intention of the producers to raise awareness of autism, perhaps it would have been pertinent to give the story a relevant, modern setting. This is a personal opinion however, and I doubt it would have mattered to most of the audience.
Most importantly, this play was made honestly and lovingly and never tried to preach or make out that autistic people are gifted or have miraculous knowledge of a strange truth or purity (a claim some parents will try to make of their disabled kids). At the risk of blurring the play and the film together, I would really recommend Rain Man to anybody interested in autism and autistic families. It explains the condition and gives examples of the some of the strange and challenging ways it manifests in very accessible examples, but also demonstrates the fact that just because your son, daughter, sibling, whoever, is autistic, it's not the end of the world and some truly bizarre and beautiful events can come out of it.
I didn't know Rainman had been turned into a play. Thanks for the information!
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