Plays and Players,
December 1967, Hugh Leonard
For a brief delirious moment, when Michael
Pennington came crashing on to the stage of the Vaudeville Theatre like a
werewolf with rabies, one expected him to announce that there were UFOs – or,
at the very least, Daleks – at the bottom of his garden. Even an appeal as to
whether there was a play-doctor in the house would not have been incongruous
within the context of the evening. But, unhappily, Mr Pennington, in his role
of Gerald Arbuthnot, merely wished to inform us that Lord Illingworth had just
offered him the position of private secretary. My expectations of
extra-terrestrial phenomena may seem unduly optimistic… all the more so, seeing
that the play in question was ‘A Woman of No Importance’ by Oscar Wilde; but
there was extenuating circumstances, inasmuch as that Paul Dehn, who ‘adapted’
the play seemed determined to throw in everything except the kitchen sink
drama.
Presumably, Mr Dehn’s intention was to render what
is, after all, fifth-rate Wilde suitable for a modern audience. On reading the
original, with its great windy stretches of purple rhetoric, one longs for the
coruscating saltiness of, say ‘East Lynn’; and our hearts go out to Mr Dehn, if
only because, or so they say, it is the thought that counts. There is hardly
anything wrong with the adaptation as such; but when faced with a ruin, one
should either leave it alone or knock it down. To try and shore it up with
bricks from more sightly buildings can only result in this case of a kind of
Oscar Memorial far more grotesque than Epstein’s.
Mr Dehn’s restorative hand is in evidence
everywhere. He has reduced the number of settings by half, and the number of
acts from four to three, greatly to his credit, he has turned a minor character
– the Archdeacon – into a comic creation of such gentle hilarity as to out
frock Canon Chasuble. Enlarged from Wilde’s thumbnail sketch, the Archdeacon
prattles ceaselessly about his (unseen) wife; and, by the time her various
ailments and afflictions have been enumerated – and they range from headache to
total paralysis – she has emerged as the funniest off-stage character since
Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’. Not so successful is Mr Dehn’s master plan: to
prune ruthlessly the melodramatic excesses of the plot, and fill in the
resultant gaps with so many epigrams that the play, as it now stands, will be
retitled ‘The Most of Wilde’. Some of the epigrams are borrowed from other Wildean
works: some are presumably Mr Dehn’s own inventions: and, as for others, one
would need a copy of the text, a dictionary of quotations and a research
scholarship to track them down. But the pastiche is skilfully done: and my only
grumble is that the play itself gets bogged down in an endless swamp of
aphoristic chatter. Shaw got away with it because his talk-ins were about
something; Mr Dehn doesn’t, because his dialogues are about everything.
At least Oscar knew when to stop.
How strange it is that the urbane Wilde could have
written such a line as ‘Stop, Gerald, stop! He is your own father!’ And it even
stranger that Mr Dehn should have retained it. The play is so hopelessly out of
date by now that the wicked Lord Illingworth seems rather a gentle soul,
despite Tony Britton’s habit of curling his lip villainously and so
relentlessly that one gets the impression that he has had it permanently waved.
But one could sympathise with even the most dastardly cur in Burke’s Peerage,
when his vis-à-vis happens to be Mrs Arbuthnot, as played by Phyllis Calvert.
She rants on about her ‘shame’ of twenty years previously with such shrill
insistence that one can only suspect that she rather enjoyed it at the time;
and when Mr Britton comes to reclaim his natural son – which he does with the
furtive air of a clergyman trying to borrow a copy of ‘Fanny Hill’ – Miss
Calvert squeaks her disdain at him with such elfin fury as to make us wonder
what Lord Illingworth ever saw in her in the first place. As the son in question,
Michael Pennington was a proper bastard – literally speaking.
This was one of those productions which features
the magic words ‘Six Stars in…’ in lights outside the theatre. Which rather
reminds us of Joxer’s query: ‘What is the stars?’ but the billing, if
inaccurate, isn’t important. Generally, the playing here is on a high level,
even if only Pauline Jameson, as Mrs Allonby, possesses the nicety of style to
deliver an epigram without making it sound like De Gaulle at his most immortal.
Diane Hart was a gorgeously twee Lady Sturfield, while James Hayter walked away
with the evening as the Archdeacon. (How revealing it is that the biggest
laughs went to pieces of character acting, as opposed to purely verbal
witticisms.) There was a beautifully
doddering Sir John from George Desmond; but the prudish Hester, Portland Mason
seemed ill at ease: the character is such a stick, however, that one could
hardly blame her.
Malcolm Farquhar’s direction was sluggish and did
little to overcome the general stasis on the one hand, and the frantic
melodramatics on the other. The sets were awful. And evening, I fear, of no
importance.
Return to
Production Information