“My house is full of vagabonds that no
sane person would have near them,” remarks Samuel Johnson in this
adaptation from James Boswell’s books about the 18th-century critic,
conversationalist and lexicographer. The line resonates more
exquisitely when the audience (a) includes a gaggle of 21st-century
critics and (b) is not simply in the imagined space of Johnson’s house,
but in the very building… indeed, in the very garret in which he
compiled the first
Dictionary Of The English Language. Out Of Joint’s small-scale tour stops off for a few evenings at Johnson’s house, just behind Fleet Street.
The
play is in effect a two-hander performed by its co-adapters (along with
director Max Stafford-Clark): Ian Redford is Johnson, and Russell Barr
is Boswell and everyone else ranging from his housekeeper, “a poor
blind lady from Wales”, to King George III. (In an amusingly cheeky
touch, Johnson’s cat Hodge is represented by Barr’s Jack Russell
terrier.) Redford does not deliver Johnson’s epigrams in the plummy
tones of our mind’s ear, but rather in the good doctor’s authentically
broad Black Country accent, “a most uncouth voice” as Boswell observed
on first meeting. As for those aphorisms themselves, I began by keeping
a tally but had given up within five or six minutes, so fecund is the
material in this regard. Also interspersed are a clutch of Johnson’s
dictionary definitions, beginning of course with “Lexicographer: a
writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge”.
This
is a portrait, not a narrative play: we hear Johnson’s opinions on
mortality, melancholy, his parents and his marriage, David Garrick and
Boswell’s biographising, and proceed thus to the pair’s tour of the
Hebrides. When Johnson’s attention turns to his beloved Mrs Thrale,
then at this performance and a few others on the tour Barr is
decorously relieved of that role by Trudie Styler, who smilingly
details Johnson’s appearance as if sizing him up for Tantra rather than
tea. Dramatically, then, a slight piece, but Johnson so bestrides our
literary and linguistic culture that even such an 80-minute trot offers
delights aplenty.
Written for the Financial
Times.