Goodbye Golden years

If there is one thing Bea Arthur wants her audience to know, it is that she was not just a Golden Girl. For while she is best remembered for her role as the deep-voiced Dorothy Zbornak in the popular Eighties sitcom about four middle-aged women living in Miami, she is keen to remind us of her long-established Broadway credentials. Whether we desire our memories to be jogged in such a way is, however, another matter entirely.

Even if Arthur did win a Tony Award for Mame and an Emmy for her other sitcom, Maude, as well as a second for The Golden Girls, she is definitely not a big enough star on this side of the Atlantic to start a solo show with a lengthy description of her preferred dinner party menu.

Still, with Billy Goldenberg, her trusty pianist and the show's co-creator, at her side, she eventually tears her thoughts away from food and launches into two of the most pointless hours the West End has seen in many a sad week.

Anecdotes about her early showbiz life as a struggling actress in post-War New York cannot begin to compare with Elaine Stritch, to whose recent solo show this woefully unstructured and unrevealing piece will rightly be held up and judged sorely lacking.

As often happens in this sort of misguided nostalgia trip, Arthur reveals that she has studied with, understudied, shared dressing rooms and elevators with a host of famous people who, wouldn't you just know it, had a bon mot for every occasion. She trawls through these - Angela "Angie" Lansbury, fans of Murder, She Wrote will be shocked to learn, has "a mouth like a truck driver" - and when such anecdotage is exhausted, she tells a joke about a nun and a taxi driver.

It is hard to envisage London containing enough fans of an American sitcom that ended 11 years ago to fill this theatre for the remaining thirty-something performances, but even if it does, they will be in for a nasty surprise. For instead of behind-the-scenes gossip about working life with Estelle Getty, Rue McClanahan and Betty White, The Golden Girls gets only the most fleeting of mentions. Instead, there are some undistinguished songs, all delivered in the spoken-through manner of Rex Harrison, and excruciating banter with Goldenberg.

"When I started to put this show together, people asked me 'why?','' she says. It is a question that remains glaringly unanswered.

Bea Arthur At The Savoy