“God help us, every one.” The last words
of Nicholas Wright’s play are a brilliant post-Dickensian
transformation, blending resolve in facing the future with a bleak
absence of illusion. For me, it sets the seal on Wright’s adaptation of
Patrick Hamilton’s 1947 novel, which sustains a number of disparate yet
parallel interpretations.
Wright’s version of Hamilton’s story centres on Miss Roach, an
introspective and somewhat melancholy publisher’s reader who, having
been bombed out of her flat in London during the Blitz, now in 1943
lives in a boarding-house in Henley-on-Thames; she generally has little
to do with her fellow boarders beyond mealtimes, but nurses a cordial
loathing of a pompous old geezer who baits her endlessly for the heresy
of liberalism, and a German-born woman who moves into the neighbouring
room and is generally too exuberant and insinuating for her muted
tastes. She makes the acquaintance of a black U.S. Army lieutenant, but
their relationship follows a switchback course due to his compulsive
drinking and womanising as well as her own cast of mind.
This can be viewed as a rare account of civilian life during WW2, with
added insight into how little the American racism of the period was
shared by Britons. It can be a parable for the state of the nation
today, with attitudes of extremism and open hostility consistently
gaining more traction than more restrained approaches. For me, it is –
without ever being explicit – a masterly portrait of depression: the
sometimes exaggerated view of others’ behaviour and feeling that it is
personally directed, the inability to engage reliably in the kind of
improvisation integral to everyday social interaction. Fenella Woolgar
as Miss Roach seems always to be nursing an intensity that she is
unable to express and despairing of ever communicating.
Jonathan Kent’s production is unhurried: scenes unfold at a natural
pace, and are separated by the use of a travelling “wipe” screen which
moves across the stage, bearing a mottled projection perhaps intended
to suggest the incessant flow of the Thames. There is much here to
quietly engage for a couple of hours, as long as it isn’t any kind of
optimism you’re looking for.
Written for the Financial
Times.