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It’s taken six years for Tracy Letts’s follow-up to his smash ‘August: Osage County’ to get a UK production. Which a surprise, but upon seeing it what’s more surprising still is that ‘Superior Donuts’ hasn’t been made into a film yet. This bittersweet, beautifully proportioned, big-hearted and formally conventional play would be way better suited to the screen than the claustrophobic ‘August’, which indubitably lost something in translation.
Superior Donuts is a venerable Chicago doughnut shop, founded by the Polish immigrant parents of Arthur (Mitchell Mullen), the sagging joint’s ageing hippie proprietor. Business is not good, and Arthur’s refusal to sell up to his ‘colourful’ Russian neighbour Max (Nick Cavaliere) seem largely attributable to the fact that he can’t really think of anything else to do with himself. But then eccentric neighbourhood kid Franco (Jonathan Livingstone) excitedly barges his way in and talks his way into an assistant’s job, and an unlikely/entirely predictable friendship is born.
Chased with astringent wit and an undercurrent of darkness, ‘Superior Donuts’ is neither pandering nor cornball sentimental. But its old-fashioned odd-couple humour, folksy warmth and unabashedly conventional plotting feels better suited to the multiplex than a tiny fringe theatre – it’s a big, accessible story that cries out for celebrity casting and large audiences.
This is not to down to Ned Bennett’s production, which is both satisfying and substantial, in a gentle way, with fine turns from Mullen – veteran of the NT’s production of ‘August: Osage County’ – as the burned-out Arthur, Livingstone as the ebullient but troubled Franco, and a compelling cameo from David Partridge as erudite local crime king Luther.
But like an energetic dog cooped up in a London flat, ‘Superior Donuts’s big-hearted frame feels a bit squashed on the fringe.