Great design, shame about the flaws

BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S

Lowry, Salford to Saturday

EVERYONE remembers this story best as the movie starring Audrey Hepburn, though it might not have been quite so successful if writer Truman Capoteís first choice - Marilyn Monroe - had got the part.

It was the combination of Hepburn’s beauty and classiness that won the audience’s attention: the movie would have been entirely different - more like the book, I suspect - if director Blake Edwards had been working with the notoriously flaky blonde.

But truth to tell the book is anyway a rather quirky idea that doesn’t quite pay off; deeper, of course, but neither as romantic nor as funny as the movie.

True, Holly Golightly in the book isn’t quite as classy as Hepburn: she’s a once dirt-poor farm girl, raised then married at 14 by a vet whom she leaves for New York at 16 or so.

There she becomes the plaything of the social elite of the post-war city, the story ending when her hectic life drives her away from Manhattan, where her friend, the unnamed narrator, hears of her again years later only in passing.

Films, and indeed stage adaptations, require more fulfilling endings (or much better, deeper acting) which is why this adaptation, directed by Nikolai Foster, isn’t quite the hit it might have been.

Picking pop songstress Pixie Lott as Holly seems a great bit of casting, but neither she nor narrator/best friend “Fred” (Matt Barber) have the acting depth to pull off the roles. She bustles her way through in full pelt, dizzy gamine mode while Barber seems not to act but to declaim rather a lot. In fact that is another problem with the production: it’s wordy. very wordy. Based on a short novella, it’s got enough chat for war and peace.

The result of all this stand up and speak out loud stuff is a curiously unfulfilling experience all round: I didn’t much like either of these two characters, and the people around them were also pretty unpleasant on the whole.

Building up to a finish in which Holly ditches new York for Brazil, the story open-ended, is just another reason not to like the whole thing.

Which is a shame because clearly the producers are hoping for a big deal: the sets have had a lot of money spent on double-height apartments, fire escapes, highly-detailed bars and rooms and more. As far as the design goes, it’s great. But design alone doesn’t an attractive experience make.