Virtually
every stage production has a designated moment a few minutes into the
show at which latecomers are to be admitted. Deliciously, in the case
of Nicholas Wright’s play this point is literally the last of the
Duchess: punters enter as the Duchess of Windsor exits after her sole,
brief opening scene. For the play is not about her life in exile with
and then her viduity after the death of the former Edward VIII, but
about… well.
In the most direct
narrative sense, it is about the tussle between the Duchess’s, to say
the very least, fiercely protective and possibly wickedly possessive
lawyer Maître Suzanne Blum and Lady Caroline Blackwood, dispatched by
The Sunday Times
to Paris in 1980 to write a profile of the Duchess but soon persuaded
that Blum’s apparently iron grip on the ducal household was the more
interesting story. Thematically, it is about portraiture: not only the
truth that Blackwood might or might not attain in her piece (which
later became the book, unpublished until Blum’s death in 1993, from
which Wright has made this skilful adaptation), but the truth of any
second-order account of a person; for Blackwood herself had been
intimately portrayed in oils by her first husband Lucian Freud and in
poetry by her third, Robert Lowell. On a tonal level, it is also about
snobbery, what we expect of those of elevated social status and what we
may forgive in them: Anna Chancellor’s Blackwood spends the second act
knocking back vodka and growing ever more rambunctious, and the
Windsors’ circle of acquaintance is represented by Angela Thorne as
Diana Mosley (
née Mitford),
whose remarks about her beloved “Oz” show us how much vileness we
British are prepared to excuse in someone well-bred who makes us smile.
Richard Eyre, who directs with his usual scrupulousness and quiet
incisiveness, describes the play’s subject as “snobbery with violence”.
Chancellor
relishes the drunkenness (although most of her slips of the tongue are
scripted), but she gets to the heart of a character who has profound
experience of both the social and biographical dimensions to her
assignment. Sheila Hancock shows Blum’s tendency to be overawed by
titles but also her ramrod-straight professional principles regardless
of what the power dynamic in the house might be. And Wright assuredly
banishes the bland aftertaste left by his last adaptation
Rattigan’s Nijinsky a few months ago.
Written for the Financial
Times.