Peter Hall’s presentations each summer
at Bath are often concerned with various kinds of Englishness, as
befits such a terribly English town. But this is not to say that either
Bath or Hall’s programming is reactionary. Rather, it presents us with
the familiar in ways that make us re-examine our preconceptions.
Of course, sometimes the conclusion is that our assumptions were right
after all.
Noël Coward’s
This Happy Breed,
which opens the Hall company’s 2011 season in a production by Stephen
Unwin, may have seemed on its opening in 1942 (three years after it was
written) like a propaganda piece hymning the British virtues as
displayed by one ordinary family in Clapham between 1919 and 1939. But
its tone is not one of ostentatious pride. These are the modest
virtues: honesty and decency (not decorum, which is quite different),
tolerance and reasonableness. Frank Gibbons concedes that the
Communists have a point, except that they want to rush things at an
un-English pace. When he and his son return home from striving on
opposite sides during the 1926 General Strike, Frank does not take
issue with his son’s left-wing politics, but berates him roundly for
leaving for days without a word to his fretting mother. Frank does,
however, draw the line at Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler; in his
view you would have to be mad, in a blue funk or his Christian
Scientist sister-in-law to be satisfied with that deal. Coward was a
master of poised comedy, but one feels that his soul lay with those of
his own far-from-grand background. This is a gloriously human
extended-family portrait.
Unwin’s cast of 12 constitute a fine
ensemble, but at their core are the principal couple, Frank (originally
played by Coward) and Ethel. Dean Lennox Kelly and Rebecca Johnson are
admirably unshowy, with Frank’s slight tendency towards optimism and
wryness balancing Ethel’s solicitude. But pretty much everyone gets
their turn in the spotlight, whether it is the future son-in-law’s
Bolshie Christmas-dinner oration or the classically grumbling
mother-in-law. The world may be radically different now (as it was even
by the time of the play’s première), but these are national
characteristics to which we can always aspire with a sense of
justification.
Written for the Financial
Times.