In fact it’s a shade under fifty years
on for this revival of Alan Bennett’s 1968 breakthrough play, which
uses a public school as an emblem for England as it engages in a
hotch-potch revue of the twentieth century featuring all the old-skool
(ha) national virtues and vices. However, the production also looks
forward in several ways. This is Chichester’s first production under
its new artistic director Daniel Evans. Evans was a class act running
the theatres in Sheffield, and one expects him here to follow a similar
path to his predecessor Jonathan Church: cannily mixing more
traditional productions to appeal to Chichester’s conservative core
audience with other ventures that push the envelope. Evans’ next bit of
programming comes from his forte of musical theatre, being Tony Kushner
and Jeanine Tesori’s
Caroline, Or
Change.
Even here, musical director Tom Brady gets to cut loose repeatedly: not
only does the bill of fare run from a Flying Pickets-style a capella “I
Vow To Thee, My Country” to a school-choir-and-solo-tap-dancer
rendition of Thirties novelty number “Little Sir Echo”, but he and
Evans have 50-odd members of Chichester’s youth theatre to flesh out
their arrangements and choreography.
As the outgoing headmaster, Richard Wilson would seem ideally irascible
casting. Unfortunately, at this point his fangs are still drawn by a
surreptitious yet noticeable reliance on half-hidden copies of the
script. On press night we repeatedly saw the Wilsonian head of steam
building, only to dissipate with a glance at the order of service or
the headmaster’s own pages in the entertainment (cheekily disguising
the script as a script, but a
different
script... sort of...). Alan Cox utilises his knack for deadpanning
absurdity as the director and star of the revue, and Jenny Galloway as
Matron has a couple of nicely understated segments.
Bennett has always been fundamentally ambivalent about Englishness,
interrogating and lampooning it without ever loosening his embrace of
it. In 1968, I suspect the net effect of this play would have been to
deflate some myths still held too dearly when World War Two was fresh
in memory; in the Brexit Britain of 2017, eager to deny its knowingness
and reconnect with old archetypes – and, yes, I have to say,
particularly in Chichester – I fear it serves more to reinflate them.
Written for the Financial
Times.