DAILY TELEGRAPH 28.2.86 John Barber WITTILY AND stylishly produced �Across from the Garden of Allah�, Charles Wood's new play at the Comedy begins as a lethargic conversation-piece and builds up into an indictment of Hollywood, which the author may want us to see as only an extreme example of all that is decadent and malodorous in modern city life. Glenda Jackson, looking enchanting, gives a nicely controlled performance as the finical housewife from Banbury in good country tweeds. Equally enjoyable is Nigel Hawthorne as he earnest-to-rueful husband, a screenwriter whose scripts are bought but usually not made. A delicious set by Ralph Koltai, which rolls round on itself and then over like a garage-door, suggests a hotel room or a swimming-pool patio at the not-so-chic end of Sunset Boulevard. The writer has been flown here for conferences on his latest script and she is �the bride along for the ride,� prepared to be thrilled. But disapproving and fully dressed by the pool, she is surprised from the start by the coarse importuning and the unappetising nudes in high heels. Later she notes the rubbish-filled gutters and is scared by the spying and ogling that goes on beneath the unnerving neon signs and murals. There is no story. We get the couple's rather flat middle-aged banter, the visits to their hotel room by a cheery bellhop (Andy Lucas), and the writers persistent worry that the studio never calls him. Suddenly they are arrested out walking (nobody in Hollywood walks) and are brutally mauled by the cops on suspicion of a drug connection with their studio bosses � who have fled. Now the writer begins to see movieland through his wife's eyes, as a kind of hell, peopled by gorgeous girls, but policed by screaming helicopters and at the mercy of thugs and rapists. She feels so degraded by it all she cannot telephone her daughter in England for fear of causing long distance pollution. As subtly directed by Ron Daniels, the couple's holiday humour invisibly gives way to their perception of a society so aggressive and so sex-obsessed they cannot wait to get home, feeling themselves outcasts in an alien land. Although it finally packs a Puritanical punch, this little morality � Mr Wood's third and sourest play about movie people � develops insufficient interest in its three characters, and is too scant of incident, to make enthralling theatre. LONDON STANDARD 28.2.86 Milton Shulman ALTHOUGH Hollywood has been compared to a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat, it will always be revered as the town that manufactured celluloid dreams. Uninspiring buildings like Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the Brown Derby and the Garden of Allah have acquired the status of legends because they were places where filmstars ate slept and had their footprints preserved in cement. The Garden of Allah on Sunset Strip closed in 1959 after years of catering for the whims and orgies of the cinema's aristocracy. The title of Charles Wood's play, Across from the Garden of Allah at The Comedy, reflects the need of film addicts to cling to memories of Hollywood's glory even if Allah no longer exists. Scriptwriters and Europeans have always had hypocritical attitudes to Hollywood. They grabbed its money and rubbished its reputation. Douglas, an Englishman who has made a living writing movies that are never made, has cultivated a typical twischy love � hate relationship with the film capital. In a hotel room opposite the site of the Allah, he sits in his underwear struggling with the problem of another rewrite of a picture based on Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. He is accompanied by his wife, and actress who at 50 resents the passing of her reputation and beauty, and loathes everything about Hollywood. This sour pair spend their time observing and ridiculing the nude bathers in the hotel pool, the flowers and fruit wrapped in Cellophane that smell and taste of nothing, the devious activities of agents and producers, the hookers parading in Sunset Strip on a Saturday night. So, what's new, you may well ask. What's new is the element of physical violence that is new epidemic in Hollywood. Venturing into the street Douglas is robbed by kids who are knowledgable about Shakespeare and the couple are arrested by police who suspect them of being involved in a drug ring masquarading as a film company. Charles Wood observes this familiar territory with a cynical eye and manages to keep our interest in a very trifling play by his mordant and sharp wit. Glenda Jackson and Nigel Hawthorne are perfectly matched as middle-aged sparring partners taking out their frustrations by deriding Hollywood. She makes no concessions to the California weather stubbornly wrapped in tweeds and sensible shoes and rolling out with precise diction her litany of complaints. Hawthorne, wavering between desire for acclaim and lathing the means by which he can get it, wears the morose look of a dentist who has lost his best drill, but keeps us amused by expertly shrugging off his problems. Ralph Koltai's set of a claustrophobic hotel room topped by garish neon lights neatly symbolises the place and Ron Daniels directs with nice precision. SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 9.3.86 Francis King THE NARROW, surly anti-Americanism, born of envy and masquarading as patriotism, now as prevalent as flu in this country and no less debilitating, is the driving force of Cahrles Wood's Across from the Garden of Allah (Comedy). But neither the wit of this three-hander nor impeccable performances from Glenda Jackson, Nigel Hawthorne and an actor unfamiliar to me, Andy Lucas, can make its flavour, as of a mildewed lemon, palatable. A stingy, middle-aged English writer, given to uncontrollable erections (Mr Wood makes more of this than it deserves), is holed up in a Hollywood hotel, rewriting the rewrite of a film script of Waugh's �Vile Bodies�. Meanwhile his wife, a faded English rose with thorns dripping venom, surveys a brave new world of beautiful physiques and empty minds with amazement and disgust. The only dramatic event of the first act comes at its close, when a woman expires besides the hotel swimming-pool. In the second act the writer gets mugged, he and his wife are arrested for walking instead of travelling by car, prostitutes stage a demonstration, and helicopters swoop around the hotel. Two messages are clear: One intended by the author, is that Hollywood is awful, the other presumably unintended by him, is that his English visitors are even more so. One can, however, feel liking for Andy Lucas's Mexican bellhop who, even when untipped by the crass couple, manages to remain friendly and helpful.