Lindsay Lohan ‘rebuilding’ in London

She forgot her lines — at least five times — and managed to fluff her only major speech of the play. The audience laughed but it was at her, sadly, not with her.

As an ambitious Hollywood secretary called Karen in a new West End production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, Lindsay Lohan spends a lot of the play staring into a book she hopes to turn into a film. When the audience is left wondering whether the tome was just a prop or actually contained her lines, it’s a fairly desperate state of affairs.

As the cast and crew of the Playhouse Theatre production absorbed the audience feedback, you have to ask whether this was all part of the script. Cynics have always wondered why the play’s producers and director offered the only female part — in a cast of just three people — to an actress so mired in notoriety and incompetence that her “performances” nowadays tend to come from Californian police stations, courtrooms and rehabilitation clinics.

Was it a brave attempt to give a second chance — or a third or fourth — to a 28-year-old Hollywood actress who once showed great promise? Or was it the most cynical exercise yet in hanging a production on a star name, encouraging punters to come and experience whatever the theatrical equivalent is of ‘car crash TV’?

To be fair, it wasn’t complete carnage — most agree she improved after a nervous and shaky start — and Lohan had prepared everyone not to expect her to be perfect. She admitted recently she was having trouble learning her lines after so long out of acting and that, apart from a childhood Cinderella show, she’d never been on stage.

Hardcore ‘LiLo’ fans in the audience were predictably enthralled by her performance although for others, initial amusement at the slip-ups soon turned to annoyance. Many made their views clear on Twitter, congratulating the unseen woman prompter who was feeding Lohan her lines or noting how the actress laughed every time she got something wrong.

A critic from the online newspaper The Daily Beast reported how, halfway through the second act, “the audience was openly laughing at Lohan’s struggle to grasp Mamet’s sharp, trademark dialogue.” When one of her fellow cast members told her “You have done a fantastic job!”, many onlookers couldn’t help but titter. The same happened when — in a moment of supposedly tragic introspection — Lohan’s character admitted: “I know what it is to be bad, I’ve been bad.”

She certainly has. But Lohan insists she wants to be good now. In interviews she has confided how she sees moving to London for the play as a new phase in her life — adding that it could become a permanent move away from the temptations she has succumbed to in Los Angeles and New York, and from the constant public scrutiny she has endured.

She says she wants people to “focus on the fact that I’m in this industry because I’m an actress and artist, and not just someone you take photos of.”

Nightclubs

This striving for professionalism hasn’t quite seen an accompanying change in her social life yet. She is regularly being photographed emerging from London’s hottest restaurants and nightclubs in shimmering party dresses when she might have been tucked up in bed with a cocoa learning her lines.

Lohan has reportedly racked up huge bills — as high as £300,000 (Dh1.7 million) according to one source — on clothes, hotel and bar bills since she came to London in July to start rehearsals for the play. She’s understood to be living in a private flat in Mayfair after initially staying at various expensive hotels, and has been a regular late-night fixture at the trendy celebrity haunt Chiltern Firehouse.

Lindsay’s image certainly wasn’t helped either after a US magazine in March published a long list of lovers that the actress had written down, supposedly to impress friends during a boozy night out. Among the 36 names were actors Orlando Bloom, Heath Ledger, Colin Farrell, Justin Timberlake and Ashton Kutcher. Lohan claimed she had compiled them as part of her therapy at the Betty Ford addiction clinic.

We haven’t heard much about her on the men front during her London soujourn — or on women for that matter, as Lohan reportedly went through a lesbian spell in LA with British DJ Samantha Ronson. But she insists that’s because she’s so intent on reviving her acting career.

‘Feels like home’

“Being here in London is all about me this time,” the red-headed actress said earlier this month. “Yeah, English guys are cute, but it’s not about the boys. It’s about getting away from New York and Los Angeles and starting afresh, which is all very exciting for me. I love London and lived here for eight months once before, so it feels like home.”

The transatlantic move has certainly meant a break — so far — from the endless headlines about her arrests for drunk-driving, shoplifting and assaults, coupled with her court appearances, stints in rehab and even spells in prison.

Even by Hollywood’s high standards, few stars could hold a candle to Lohan when it came to drugs and drink binges, on-stage tantrums and no end of dysfunctional, diva-like behaviour.

It was as a sweet-faced, freckled 11-year-old that she came to prominence, playing a set of twins in a remake of the sister-swap film The Parent Trap. Roles in teenybopper films such as Freaky Friday and Mean Girls followed. She was hailed as the next big thing, and became a role model for countless teenage girls.

But like many child stars, the pressures of fame began to tell.

She was soon banned from nightclubs for unpaid bills and wild behaviour. A string of convictions followed. She was arrested for driving under the influence of drink or drugs, possession of cocaine and for stealing a £1,600 necklace from a shop.

Sometimes she turned up to her court hearings — sometimes she didn’t bother.

A year ago, it emerged she was broke and living in her teenage bedroom at her mother’s house on Long Island, New York.

Her last major acting venture, a 2013 erotic thriller called The Canyons, attracted such notoriety that her re-emergence in any dramatic endeavour is a small miracle in itself.

In a New York Times article headlined “This is what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie”, a reporter who had sat in on the entire film-making process, told how Lohan had brought the low-budget film to its knees with her continual absenteeism, screaming fits and feuding with cast and director. Lohan confirmed the report was “pretty accurate.”

Critics said the shambles illustrated how a cynical Hollywood was ready to exploit a clearly damaged and troubled young woman willing to do almost anything to revive her career. The film’s tawdry, nudity-filled script was about a group of decadent young people desperate to break into films. Most actresses would have run screaming from such a prospect, but when the film’s producer contacted her agent, Lohan jumped at the chance. She made clear she believed the role could have been written for her, even though she was paid only £63 a day with a share of any profits.

“We don’t have to save her,” Paul Schrader, the film’s director, cynically told members of the crew appalled by the notoriously unreliable Lohan. “We just have to get her through three weeks in July.”

The New York Times reported how Lohan was so poor at turning up to rehearsals that Schrader pretended to sack her. She sat outside his hotel room in tears pleading for a second chance, but her behaviour veered off track again when filming started.

Even the final day’s filming proved disastrous after Lohan hit the town with her pop star friend Lady Gaga. When she turned up three hours late after having had next to no sleep, Lohan’s personal doctor suddenly turned up on set.

He declared her too ill to continue working and sent her home. Her porn actor co-star, James Deen, compared Lohan’s behaviour — sometimes refusing to come out of her dressing room — to a “child lashing out.”

It wasn’t entirely her fault, he added generously, as she had been ruined by a Hollywood system that had left her lost and confused if she wasn’t instantly indulged. For all her naked, bed-hopping endeavours, the film played in just a handful of cinemas before going straight to video.

It would be surprising if Lohan was able to get away with anything like that sort of behaviour in the West End, but then despite her struggling performance on Wednesday night, she does appear to have raised her game.

She has proved she can get to the theatre on time, deliver most of her lines and accept a bouquet at the curtain call without hurling it at anyone. By Lindsay Lohan’s standards, that is progress.