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Such is the draw of a three-person cast headed by Miriam Margolyes that this new play about Helena Rubinstein, the blunt and brash doyenne of a makeup empire in 1950s and ’60s New York, has already sold out its month-long run at north London’s Park Theatre. Margolyes is fun as Rubinstein, in a crowd-pleasing way, as she revels in her character’s bullish, coarse, grotesque persona, spitting out endless one-liners and barbs. But the play around her is confused and underwhelming. It jolts episodically through several years of the Polish-born businesswoman’s later life and leans on broad comedy and shallow character tics while paying glossy-lips service to deeper themes.
John Misto’s biographical drama takes us from 1951 Manhattan to Rubinstein’s death in 1965, and its many, many scene changes and meandering points of interest have set director Jez Bond an insurmountable challenge: to keep his production fluid and focused. You’d need the energy and invention of Simon McBurney’s recent theatrical biopic of Robert Evans, ‘The Kid Stays in the Picture’, another tale of flawed American power and celebrity, to make ‘Madame Rubinstein’ more than a diverting amble through a life – but neither are present here.
Misto gives us two foils: Rubinstein’s on-off right-hand man, Patrick O’Higgins (Jonathan Forbes – best known for playing the Irish brother in ‘Catastrophe’) and her arch rival Elizabeth Arden (Frances Barber, as OTT as Margolyes). The relationship with O’Higgins is based on fact, while the rivalrous contact with Arden is entirely fictional – yet both the play and the production fail to make the distinction in any clear or meaningful way. A focus on one or the other might have made this a less fractured character study and prevented the gaping holes being filled with endless bitchy bluster.