Did London Critics Find Fuddy Meers Memorable?
Here is a sampling of what they had to say:
Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: "Fuddy Meers is crazy-speak for funny mirrors. At any rate, those are the words that Julia McKenzie, playing a stroke victim, uses when she remembers taking her son to the fairground. The problem is that they say more about David Lindsay-Abaire's comedy than he might wish. Seeing it is like watching people mug and frolic in front of distorting mirrors, thinking themselves far funnier than they are. In other words, the first stage production presented by Sam Mendes's new drama-and-movie company, Scamp, is a strenuously acted disappointment. I chortled a bit at McKenzie herself when, flopping about in a dowdy dressing gown, she earnestly spouted convoluted malapropisms as if they were sheer common sense: 'ees med ah noose bah' instead of 'these men are bad news' and so on. But the first-nighters laughed a lot less than the play's success off-Broadway must have led them to hope."
Nicholas de Jongh of The Evening Standard: "The only virtue of David Lindsay-Abaire's aggressively boring farce about a victim of amnesia is its almost instant forgettability. The play vanishes in a puff of triviality… The play's own modest intention is to raise laughter by crudely depicting a world possessed by craziness and incoherence. Katie Finneran's serene Claire is snatched from her home by Tim Hopper's intense man with a limp and lisp, who wears a manacle and ski mask. He whisks Claire away to the home of her mother, Gertie, whom poor Julia McKenzie valiantly represents in incoherent babbling. The play's mysteries are preposterously resolved. Athletic Matthew Lillard's ridiculous Millet, with large puppet always to hand, is immersed in this farcical nonsense, whose termination comes as a huge relief."
Michael Billington of The Guardian: "In part, the play is a throwback to those period comedies such as Arsenic and Old Lace and You Can't Take It With You in which wackiness was a sign of liberating individualism. Lindsay-Abaire is also clearly reacting against the circumspect good taste of the Broadway disability-play. But, while all this may have resonance in America, it means little to us here… A hybrid Anglo-American cast does little to reconcile me to the play's strenuous reversal of accepted values, although Kate Finneran makes something touching out of Claire's amnesiac confusion and Nicholas Le Prevost is passably funny as her onetime druggie husband. But Angus Jackson's production strives over-hard to create an atmosphere of spiraling mayhem. And, in its jokily determined celebration of off-the-wall eccentricity, the play simply proves that too many kooks spoil the broth."
Charles Spencer of The Telegraph: "I giggled at first, but, after two hours of punishing zaniness, laughter had long since curled up and died in my throat. Worse still, like so many New York shows, the piece goes all sentimental on us in the closing minutes. Yes, you can have a good politically incorrect laugh, the dramatist David Lindsay-Abaire seems to be saying, but I'm going to send you out of the theatre with a tear in your eye as well as a smile on your face. British audiences, I fear, are made of less malleable stuff, and are more likely to spend the show's maudlin dying moments investigating the back of the seat in front to discover whether the management has thoughtfully provided a sick bag… The American actress Katie Finneran has one or two touching moments as Claire, and Nicholas Le Prevost some genuinely amusing ones as the uptight, upright husband who rediscovers the joys of dope. But Tim Hopper never musters the required menace as the psychopathic villain of the piece, and the great Julia McKenzie is entirely wasted as the stroke victim. 'Nuddin fuddy heah,' she remarks at one point, neatly providing the show with its own admirably concise obituary."