PROMPT CORNER 10/2004
The History Boys / Lifegame / Rattle Of A Simple Man /
Beautiful And Damned / Whistling Psyche
Various venues
May, 2004

Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Hytner directed a play about the sexual and political awakening of a group of public schoolboys, about the formative influence of an unconventional teacher and about clashes of ideology.  Now he’s back in the same territory.  That’s not in any way to accuse Alan Bennett’s The History Boys of being influenced by Robin Glendinning’s Mobil award-winner Mumbo Jumbo (1987 p617); although informed by similarly intelligent and spirited liberalism, Bennett’s play about Thatcherism in a Sheffield grammar and Glendinning’s about Loyalism in a Belfast one are chalk and cheese.  It’s just the kind of curiosity I like to remark on, not least because Robin himself was the unconventional teacher who kindled my own interest in theatre.  (The main juvenile role in Mumbo Jumbo, by the way, was played by a young Michael Grandage.  How’s that for spotting talent early?)

In reviews of The History Boys as in so many other instances, Nicholas de Jongh stands out as the contrarian. Pretty much everything he says about Bennett’s piece is incontestable.  It’s a chronological muddle: Eighties schoolboys with encyclopaedic knowledge of Fifties camp, and indeed a mistaken sense of the Eighties themselves as a single phase in educational history – the scene-setting snatches of period pop music specify the first half of the decade, whereas it was really only in the second half that Thatcher and her minions began to turn the educational sector into a field for pre-commercial training rather than actual learning.  Bennett is too concerned with enacting his views on education and culture in general to be that bothered about rooting them in a specific world.  The result is that the school becomes a kind of Neverland, and the events depicted less a microcosmic manifestation of a broad social and political shift than a fable about it.  Few other reviewers have dared to point out as much, as if fearful that to do so would be to damage the play irreparably.

Soaring majesty

Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t.  The power both of the play and of the argument it advances shine through all the woolliness and inconsistencies.  So the new history teacher Irwin is a compendium of bogeys, standing at various points in the timeline for Thatcherite educationalism and the blight of glib media historians and the ideological perversion of policy wonks (with, as it happens, a Blairite flavour).  So the blithe acceptance of a certain amount of homosexual fumbling is likewise at best a quaint throwback (when, if at all, will we see a revival of Roger Gellert’s underrated schoolboy-affair play Quaint Honour?) and at worst a heresy in this climate of hysterical witch-hunting.  So Frances de la Tour’s character is included almost as an afterthought, the token woman who owes her status as universal confidant not to her sex but to her sexlessness.  One can painstakingly catalogue the blemishes on the bark of every individual tree and miss the soaring majesty of the forest as a whole. The History Boys is a creation of both beauty and potency.  It makes important points with both intellectual and emotional passion.

It’s easy, also, to dismiss this kind of adulation as the apologism of reviewers who sprang from the same culture themselves and are keen to subscribe to its being thus mythologised.  But this is Nick Hytner’s National Theatre... and while Hytner the ex-Manchester Grammar School boy no doubt relished the use of a snippet of The Smiths’ song "The Headmaster Ritual", cutting off just before the opening couplet “Belligerent ghouls/Run Manchester schools”, Hytner the artistic director’s tenure on the South Bank has shown that his own concerns and interests bear little or no relation to this fictitious England, keen as he is to grapple with altogether more immediate issues as regards the National’s place in the nation’s culture.  The History Boys isn’t set in the real world, but it speaks to it and works within it, marvellously.  The well-made play is as often as not a pale, bloodless creature; this, on the other hand, is spotty, with raging hormones and that irresistible combination of restless inquisitiveness and utter certainty.  In his seventieth year, Bennett has written a nigh-perfect teenage play.

The flimsiest of hooks

Another example of a project worth watching despite flaws – and at the National once again – was Lifegame.  Phelim McDermott and his Improbable comrades’ version of Keith Johnstone’s impro approach to bio-drama contains almost limitless scope for fouling up.  That’s probably why Improbable, whose raison d’être is to embrace the spontaneous and unexpected in theatre, like it so much.  It just so happens that one of those mishaps occurred on the press night.  Not a technical catastrophe to compare with the fire that delayed the opening curtain of The History Boys, but simply this: if your interview subject – about whom you know nothing before they walk onto the stage – turns out to be a modest, unostentatious sort of person, you’re not going to get much material to work with.  They’re not going to volunteer much, or even give much away inadvertently, and so the improvised dramatic scenes will be hung on the flimsiest of hooks.  If you’re not careful, you might be perceived not so much to be celebrating this person’s life as to be persecuting them with two hours of personal intrusion.  It’s a testimony to Lee Simpson’s skill as an interviewer and McDermott’s, Angela Clerkin’s, Guy Dartnell’s et al. as improvisers that the awkwardness seldom if ever veered into outright discomfort.  Indeed, one moment from an earlier Lifegame sums up both Improbable and theatre in general for me: when the interviewer gave an answer with clear dramatic possibilities, I looked over to see McDermott silently nodding and gesturing to his fellows, with a great big smile on his face as if this were the best game of let’s-pretend ever.  Which it is, of course.

Antediluvian

So, let’s pretend.  Let’s pretend that Rattle Of A Simple Man was any kind of reasonable bet for a West End run.  (I’m now beginning to feel quite stuffed with humble pie as regards this sequence of shows closing before we can reprint their reviews.)  And let’s pretend that Beautiful And Damned can in good conscience be praised in any way.  If the schoolboys in Bennett’s play are quaint, singing Gracie Fields and acting out the end of Now, Voyager, then Charles Dyer’s play seems positively antediluvian in places, for all that it’s set in the Sixties, just at the moment when Philip Larkin has dunned it into us that sexual intercourse began.  And if Percy’s strict courtesy – refusing even to say “Damn” in front of a lady (and counting even a hooker as a lady) – was intended to seem olde-worlde then, it’s almost incomprehensible now.

John Caird’s production made the best of it in the circumstances.  Michelle Collins was astutely cast half-in type, half-against it: Cyrenne has all the mendacity but none of the malice of EastEnders’ Cindy Beale.  And Stephen Tompkinson enjoyed the comedy of gormlessness as Percy, but was restrained either by himself or by Caird from the excess of mugging that so marred his appearance in Arsenic And Old Lace last year.  Ultimately, though, the best comments were made by designer Robert Jones.  The trompe-l’oeil night cityscape just visible above and behind the main basement-flat set faintly recalled Ian MacNeil’s now-classic reimagining of the setting for An Inspector Calls, and thus suggested that the world of this play is likewise out of step and out of kilter with ours... is, as Dusty Springfield proclaimed on the authentic period Dansette-a-like record player sitting downstage right, in the middle of nowhere.

Spectacularly mediocre

Not unlike Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.  For all Roger Cook, Les Reed and Kit Hesketh-Harvey’s attempts to locate them at the centre of the jazz age, Prohibition whoop-de-do and so forth in Beautiful And Damned, they make much better icons of an era in theory than in practice.  As the reviews generally make clear, this isn’t actually a bad show; it’s not one to add to the pantheon of stinkers such as Which Witch, Bernadette or The Fields Of Ambrosia, whose producer I still gleefully remember being grilled by Jeremy Paxman on BBC-TV’s Newsnight: “Let’s face it, it’s crap, isn’t it?”.  (Indeed, part of me had been hoping this would be such a catastrophe, because I’ve managed to miss seeing my proper share of these over the years and I have some catching up to do.)  No, the problem with Beautiful And Damned isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s spectacularly mediocre.

It has ingredients that ought to lift it into graceful flight; they don’t, but nor does it collapse with a thud.  I’d been listening to some of the quirky-but-cuddly early-’70s pop of Cook’s outfit Blue Mink a little while before the show; it’s perfect of its time, but he hasn’t been able to transcend that idiom.  Many of his and Reed’s tunes seem simply to noodle around for a couple of bars in the middle of each line before they hit the final few notes that the composers knew they wanted to be there, not unlike the kind of school assembly that takes the mick out of the hymn by spending several verses going, “...drone, mumble, drone, TO BE A PIL-GRIM!”  (Look, I said I was from that kind of educational background myself, all right?)  Nor is there really that much of a story to Scott ’n’ Zelda: he makes it big, he drinks, she gibbers, The End.  Still, as I say, this won’t live on in the anals [sic] of music-theatre history; it’s a sizeable misjudgment, not a landmark calamity.

Loom portentously

Whisper it softly, but is it perhaps time to re-evaluate the oeuvre of Sebastian Barry?  Leaving aside 2002’s “ Charles Haughey” play Hinterland, Barry’s principal keynotes for the last several years have been a preoccupation with putting various of his forebears on the stage and a masterly, almost Conradian way with period language but one which doesn’t necessarily lend itself to drama.  In Whistling Psyche, he has written a pair of marvellous linked short stories; I wonder whether he ever considered turning them into a play?  I’m sorry, that’s overly cruel.  But in truth, all Claire Bloom and Kathryn Hunter can do as Florence Nightingale and Dr James Miranda Barry respectively is relish the author’s polished periods and loom portentously in the shadows.

Ah, the shadows: Barry has provided director Robert Delamere with a bare somewhere-and-nowhere location, and then done nothing with it at all, simply luxuriated in his characters’ words and narratives. Delamere does atmosphere well, but even he can’t eke this meagre portion out to sustain an entire play.  Hence Tim Mitchell’s shadows.  The final moments of the play attain a kind of sombre magic, but, well, sometimes the destination isn’t worth the journey.

Written for Theatre Record.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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