The Doctor will see you now

Having seen the 1967 Rex Harrison Doctor Dolittle in the cinema as a child (it was the same year as Disney’s first Jungle Book), I was – at the very least – curious about the latest film with Robert Downey Jr in the titular role.

What would it look like with CGI at its present level; would it have an environmental message; and  what would Downey Jr be like in his post-Tony Stark career?

Based – loosely – on the novel, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, from Hugo Lofting’s series about the eponymous doctor, it opens with him having withdrawn from any form of public life after his wife has died.

But Queen Victoria needs him – because she’s ill – and Stubbins, the teenage son of a family of local hunters needs him, because he’s accidentally shot a squirrel while trying not to shoot animals.

It is not staggeringly original, but it doesn’t really suffer from that.

While Stephen Gaghan’s film never feels howlingly original, it is superbly well executed and has enough laughs (and one big emotional moment) to retain audience interest.

If I could talk to the animals was the most famous of Leslie Bricusse’s songs from the ’67 film. It was the daydream of every child – and judging by the children in the audience today, little has changed, even without the song.

There’s really no message other than ‘be nice to each other’, ’family is what you decide it is’ and don’t be bad to animals (a message I first learned from Sheri Lewis and Lamb Chop many centuries ago).

But not everything has to have Big Messages.

The cast is a joy. Forget the faux furore over Downey Jr’s Welsh accent – the accent is unexpected, but a) why not? and b) it doesn’t get in the way of anything. And his characterisation doesn’t have the smugness of Ironman. 

In support, Jim Broadbent as Lord Thomas Badgley, Michael Sheen as Dr Blair Müdfly  and Antonio Banderas as Rassouli, the king of pirates, have huge fun as panto baddies.

Harry Collett is a charming Stubbins, while Carmel Laniado as Lady Rose (one of Victoria’s maids) also turns in a delightful, gutsy performance.

But there are stars aplenty in the voice cast, including Emma Thompson, Rami Malek, Octavia Spence, Tom Holland, Ralph Feinnes (taking a leaf out of George Saunders’s books as a tiger named Barry) Selema Gomez, Marion Cotillard and Frances de la Tour.

It all rather reminds me of Peter Rabbit – the sequel to which lands soon.

Far from a classic is is, but it’s still perfectly enjoyable light entertainment for the end of a working week. And that is not a case of damning with faint praise.

Kani and Sher provide meat for the mind

John Kani and Antony Sher

It’s South Africa, 25 years after the death of apartheid and the birth of the Rainbow Nation. Successful classical actor Jack Morris is struggling to learn his lines for the eponymous role in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Interrupted by the doorbell, he is horrified to discover that the carer/nurse that he was expecting from an agency is actually Lunga Kunene, an elderly black man and senior nursing sister.

But why does he need a carer/nurse? Because he has stage four liver cancer. Can he live long enough to perform Lear? Can he stop seeing Kunene as all black people?

Kunene and the King is written by South African acting legend John Kani (the first black Othello on stage win South Africa in 1987, and also T’Chaka in Marvel’s Black Panther), who also plays Kunene in this RSC production, which has been seen in Stratford upon Avon and Cape Town before arriving in London’s West End.

Now, just to be clear, in 1985, after appearing in the anti-apartheid play Sizwe Bansi is Dead, which Kani co-wrote with Athol Fugard, he received a phone call saying that his father wanted to see him. On the way there, Kani was surrounded by police, who beat him and left him for dead. His left eye was lost in the incident and he now wears a prosthetic.

Kani is more than qualified to give lessons in what apartheid meant – and what its legacy means. He's lived it. And he is scathing, for instance, of Jacob Zuma’s corrupt governance.

At approximately 96 minutes – with no interval – this is a short work, but while it has plenty of laughs, it’s also full of enough intensity for double that time.

In some ways, it feels simplistic: yes, yes, yes – we (the white West) know about this! Don’t labour the point!

But any simplicity is superficial. There’s real meat here – on a number of levels. The clashes of culture, ‘othering’ – and not one by any one group alone; the universality of Shakespeare; the fear of mortality …

This is a deceptive work by Kani – a work that is utterly apt not just for South Africa, but (like the Bard’s works) for everywhere and perhaps particularly in these fraught times.

The work relies on the strength of the actors playing the roles in this two-hander. At first, you think that Kani seems physically constrained –  until you understand that the character is all buckled-up self-restraint: he’s seen the worst behaviour of both white and black South Africans in the fight to set his country free and subsequently, and is fighting against his own anger to be a good human being.

His has been a life spent constantly struggling within himself to be humane and to bolt down the rage within against what he has seen and experienced.

It is a superb performance.

Opposite Kani is his South African compatriot, Antony Sher, as Morris. And Sher also turns in a simply stunning performance as someone struggling with his place within history and against a dreadful disease. Neither of the men are flawless – but neither are evil either.

It’s on until 28 March. There are still tickets available – and I recommend it.