...a glossily presented Wikipedia entry complete with enough visual reminders of Gardner herself to indicate the shortfall in McGovern’s playwriting foray.
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Will anyone other than over-60s and diehard Downton fans – a Venn diagram that’s almost a circle, surely – care for a lazy portrait of a woman who died 32 years ago, and whose heyday was in the 1950s?
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The 90 minute affair ends with much-loved footage of the star dancing in The Barefoot Contessa (1954), seductive moves from yesteryear that McGovern poignantly mimics. A shame the rest of the evening plods.
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Elizabeth McGovern’s play about Ava Gardner — in which she also plays the fading star — is based on a book by the late British journalist Peter Evans. You really do need to be a hardcore Gardner fan to enjoy this rambling, boozy string of reminiscences.
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But a sense of real narrative progress needs to come from the story, not the scenery. Ultimately, it feels like a feeble, oddly bitter attempt to capture the lustre of a star who’s already fading from cultural memory.
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As a portrait of a star from a bygone era, Ava: The Secret Conversations is efficient, if occasionally ponderous...As a meditation on celebrity and mortality, it's blithely unoriginal.
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It’s certainly not helped by the fact that both the star and the story are suffocated by a convoluted and thoroughly distracting design concept...McGovern’s debut play may not be perfect, but its dramaturgical issues are only amplified by the staging.
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But this is still a thoughtful and classy show, which shows a woman who remained resolutely herself (but always kept something back) as the men in her life looked for themselves – and lost themselves – in her dazzling glow.
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