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Most of the time whimsy is bad enough, which means that oppressive whimsy is, well, not good news. After ten minutes of this excruciating dark comedy-cum-across the generations rom-com I wanted to hack my own skin off, so irksome did I find the company of both Harold and Maude.
Colin Higgins’s script is best known in the form of the 1971 film, which tanked on release only to attain a gradual cult status. Harold (Bill Milner), 19, is a lonely young man with a passion for staging elaborate fake suicides. Maude (Sheila Hancock), 79, has a penchant for bright colours, living life to the full and stealing seals from zoos and is, in short, exhaustingly quirky. The pair shares a love of attending the funerals of people they don’t know. Of course they do.
What should – optimistically - be offbeat uplift unfortunately becomes, in Thom Southerland’s production, profoundly grating. Six supporting actor-musicians provide some infuriatingly twinkly, not to mention insistent, accompaniment.
The script offers a very tricky tonal line to tread and here it veers about all over the place; almost every word rings false. Milner looks uncomfortable; Hancock is game and shines in the rare moments of quietness, especially when giving brief hints of Viennese Maude’s wartime back-story. Nonetheless, neither of the two comes close to anything even vaguely resembling a real character.
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