Bakersfield Mist

You’d have to go back to the Palaeolithic age to find the last great play to have its premiere on the West End (well, maybe 14 years, to Alan Bennett’s ‘The Lady in the Van’). So it’s no surprise to note that ‘Bakersfield Mist’, a sassy, sentimental new drama by US playwright Stephen Sachs, is not a great play.

But it is an effective enough vehicle for a pair of top-notch older actors, and if you’ve principally come to see ‘Bakersfield Mist’ for either or both of its stars then you’ll  walk away satisfied.

In her third West End role, Kathleen Turner plays Maude, a blowsy, boozy ex-bartender whose JD-sodden life in a California trailer park could be about to change dramatically. She believes that the hideous painting she bought in a junk shop for $3 is in fact a long-lost Jackson Pollock, worth millions. And the reliably excellent Ian McDiarmid is Lionel, the fusty New York art expert who has come to give his opinion on the painting’s authenticity.

Perhaps wisely, director Polly Teale guns for laughs rather than explore the narrative’s mawkish depths. The charismatic, unaffected Turner was always going to fit the grizzled, extroverted Maude like a glove, but McDiarmid joins in by hamming up a storm. His Lionel is a giggling eccentric, forever smirking at his own obscure jokes, or jerking about the stage like some sort of strange, cuddly insect. It’s hard to believe his character was supposedly the former head curator at MoMA, but he is great fun, and there’s a natural odd-couple rapport between the two that powers ‘Bakersfield Mist’ through its slender 80-minute run time. On the more earnest side, Sachs does manage to make quite a decent point about the subjectivity of value judgements, in both art and class.

The script is peppered with crassly melodramatic revelations and po’-country-folks-ain’t-as-dumb-as-you-think shtick, but this doesn’t get too much in the way of its stars having fun – and as a night of pure fun, the stars of Bakersfield Mist give it value.