A Round Heeled Woman review, Aldwych Theatre

'Before I turn 67 next March, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me." So wrote English teacher Jane Juska in 2003, in a New York Review of Books personal ad. The series of short encounters that followed were chronicled in her first book, A Round-Heeled Woman - My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance.

Baby it's old outside

Sharon Gless, the pretty one from Cagney and Lacey, plays Juska in Jane Prowse's stage adaptation of the memoir. She's sharp, sexy and knowing, but strangely unsympathetic in this slight, amusing, mildly provocative but unsexy and ultimately unfulfilling concoction. Even allowing for a flawed narrator, this telling lacks insight. Did Juska really not see how her fractured family history impinged on her thinking: did she really not wonder why she had chosen to stay celibate for thirty years previously? There is no self-knowledge or enlightenment in either script or acting.

Of the other characters, Juska's two best friends, inexplicably, are prissy women half her age whose dialogues are just shortcuts through the content. Trollope gets thrown in and where it works it's fun. It's also funny: anyone who has blind-dated will recognise the lines and the situations - only the ages have changed. But it's not funny enough. It's not anything enough. Gless lacks nuance. There is no sense of Juska's growth as a woman, a lover or a mother.   

In conclusion: As the Free Love generation hits retirement, increasing numbers of men and women will seek late-life thrills. The subject matter is important and current. What doesn't work well enough in this instance, is the treatment of it.

References
Aldwych Theatre, tickets
Charles Spencer review in The Daily Telegraph