Hollywood Valhalla

Bewley’s Cafe Theatre, Dublin

Putting a real life on stage can create an illicit thrill, particularly when it suggests private access to a public figure. Tom Stoppard, Terry Johnson and Peter Morgan have all successfully imagined behind the scenes glimpses of artists, celebrities or politicians, portraits that require some historical sleuthing and lashings of unabashed speculation.

In Aidan Harney's new play, we find the ailing Rock Hudson in his Hollywood home in the last days of his life. What should be a riveting view of a magnificently conflicted figure – a man whose sexuality lay hidden behind the carefully constructed façade of movie-stardom and who finally brought the new plight of Aids to the attention of Reagan's America – is severely hampered by the playwright's reticence to intrude and to get to the meat of the matter.

Alone with his fitness instructor, Toby (Stewart Roche), Patrick Joseph Byrnes's Hudson is wasting dreamily away in unbidden reminiscences and forced exposition: "How is it that we met?" the physically ravaged Hudson asks Toby. This is a very good question (they met, with wild implausibility, at the gym) and it highlights Harney's bizarre choice of an interlocutor. Surely there were richer pickings in Rock's story-spinning publicists, his ex-wife, manipulative ex-lover, any number of fair-weather celebrities or, better still, his friend Nancy Reagan.

With much more interesting things going on in Hudson's life – the play begins with his casting in the soap opera Dynasty (how the mighty have fallen!) – the play focuses instead on the banal details of this friendship, and in its unhurried delivery Joe Devlin's production seems to be playing for time. Harney may be worried about repeating himself: his debut play, A Monarch in Hollywood, was a thinly veiled portrait of the young Hudson in the 1950s and the building of his myth.

Here, though, we hit the limits of representing reality in hindsight. We all know how Hudson's story ends and here it is neither contradicted, embellished nor rendered potently symbolic. Toby's worries about Aids – how is it contracted? – are plausible but redundant and by dwelling on Toby's conflicted identity the play loses a dramatic engine, with Rock's sense of purpose – to live life out in the open – coming very late: "I have never done anything heroic in my whole blasted life".

Harney seems shy to put words in Hudson's mouth, which leads to a sad kind of silence of a myth unmasked: gone is the zing we remember from Rock's romantic comedies, the excess emotion of his melodramas, or even the enjoyably breathless pap of the soap opera. Instead, we have a Rock of mumbling realism with a story that deserves better telling; a complicated film star rendered as Movie of the Week .

Runs until February 11th