The Code, Southwark Playhouse Elephant review - superbly cast, resonant play about the price of fame in Hollywood

Hot on the heels of Goodnight, Oscar comes another fictional meeting of real entertainment giants in Los Angeles, this time over a decade earlier. Michael McKeever’s The Code is a period piece, but one with a resonating message for today’s equivalents of the Hayes Code and the House Un-American Activities Committee. 

It’s 1950, on the eve of the opening of a sword-and-sandals number starring Victor Mature as Samson, who, when not waving at Hedy Lamarr’s Delilah, will apparently be seen wrestling a taxidermied lion. At least, that’s the on-dit in Hollywood, gleefully relayed by one of its leading outliers, the exotic, outspoken Tallulah Bankhead (Tracie Bennett). Bankhead is at the elegant home of her best gay friend Billy Haines (John Partridge), quaffing Gibsons and lecturing the audience in the ways of her profession.

It’s not a pleasant portrait, though it offers up hilarious nuggets about big-name stars and their offscreen antics. Bankhead's loathing of LA is spewed out in great arcs of cutting remarks, delivered in a fruity, gravelly voice by Bennett, who knows exactly how to land a line for maximum satirical effect. And what lines. Hollywood, she barks, is “Paradise with a lobotomy”, a rainless, culture-free cesspool. But when Billy (John Partridge, pictured below) tells her that after 30 years there, 24 of them with his partner Jimmy, he wants to move to an apple farm in upstate New York, she is vehement that he must stay and stand his ground against the hypocrites. Hollywood, she muses, was created by gay men, but now they have to act as if nobody knows their secret, though everybody actually does. It’s The Code.

Billy is a known antagonist of big studio bosses. When he was a star actor, he refused to give up Jimmy when Louis B Mayer of MGM insisted he get married. Instead, he moved over to interior design, working lately in the theatre. Bankhead, too, has trod the boards, famously in The Little Foxes on Broadway. She is known to be a fan of la femme, as she cod-coyly terms her sexuality, though her repertoire includes blow-jobs for famous men. As she and Billy down cocktails before heading over to George Cukor’s for dinner and a screening of Samson and Delilah, she is awaiting confirmation that she will play the lead in the movie version of The Glass Menagerie. 

Into this sparky space come two new combatants. One is real, Henry Willson (Nick Blakeley, pictured below with Solomon Davy), a leading talent agent who worked a lot with David Selznick, specialising in young males; the other is a fictional character, Chad Manford (Solomon Davy), in every sense, in that McKeever has made him up and Henry has renamed him while currently rewriting his “story”. Chad, he proclaims to his host, has both good looks and “It”, not always found in the same package. But he also comes with baggage: a “close friend” from his army days who has helped support him in LA while putting his own career as an artist on the back burner. Henry wants him out of the picture and tells Billy he should hire Chad’s boyfriend for his design studio. 

It’s an undisguised parallel with what happened to Billy and Jimmy, its resolution providing the climax of the piece, when all onstage show their true colours in a shocking or surprising way – except Bankhead, who is never less than herself throughout. Bennett delivers an award-worthy performance, skittering around on her slim-ankled feet in a perfect full-skirted cocktail dress, the epitome of Tinseltown glamour. Her contrasting acerbic, foul-mouthed commentary is a comic delight, but one that can be moving too, when her sense of the absurd temporarily abandons her. A self-proclaimed survivor, she exits with a defiant swirl of her mink stole and all the spirit of a true original. 

The whole cast are perfection alongside her. Newbie Davy really holds his own, a boyish ingenu at first who causes a sharp intake of breath when he calls Billy a “decorator”, then self-hating as the reality of the world he has chosen starts growing sour on him. Partridge, despite a tendency to swallow some of his words, is an affecting, dignified presence under his surface glamour. And Blakeley provides a chilling portrait of a Machiavel who has shelved any dreams he might have had in favour of a hard-nosed cynicism. He is a reminder of the price of denying your own authenticity, a clever man who treats life as a screenplay with many opportunities for rewrites. He has no regard for the profession he represents, getting a big laugh when he quips that anybody can be an actor, “with the right looks, a decent director – and 200 takes”. Chad, he savagely tells him, does not exist, he's just "an idea".

The production, designed by Ethan Cheek, looks a million dollars, a study in sunset-peach blinds and modish white sofas, with all the deco chrome and glass trimmings of the era. Over the top of the set, a giant cutout reminds us where we are, a young blonde’s face peeping out of a backdrop of the Hollywoodland sign that originally looked over the city. Director Christopher Renshaw keeps all the elements of the plot buoyant without ramming home its topical message that “normal” is a straitjacket that punishes those who don’t fit its proscriptions. “We live in dangerous times,” Bankhead says, and you can’t help thinking of the forces now pursuing the people and organisations in this category, for whom the “code” of hiding and staying silent about who you are is becoming more challenging every day.

• The Code at Southwark Playhouse Elephant until 11 October
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