The Best of
Friends
The British Theatre
Guide, Philip Fisher
Hugh
Whitemore, who adapted ‘As You Desire Me’ so successfully last year, generally
specialises in old fashion plays where ideas not so much prevail over action as
replace it. His attitude might well be summed up by a quote from George Bernard
Shaw repeated in this play, “plot is the curse of serious drama”. Even for him,
‘The Best of Friends’ must have seemed an unlikely venture.
It
is based on the letters of an unusual triumvirate of gentle, learned souls who
exchanged ideas during the first half of the last century.
It
is possible to have a highly entertaining epistolary play. Taking the two ends
of the scale, ‘The Best of Friends’ is far closer to ’84 Charing Cross Road’, a
play like this one directed by James Roose Evans and adapted for film by the
same playwright, than that upmarket French sex romp, ‘Les Liaisons
Dangereuses’.
For
viewers today, only one of the three protagonists, playwright George Bernard Shaw,
is still well known. Sir Sydney Cockerell, who describes himself as “an
unremarkable person without a spark of imagination” could probably not survive
today. As well as being the father of Christopher Cockerell, the inventor of
the hovercraft, he was curator of the
He
was the linchpin between Shaw and Dame Laurentia McLachlan, a nun who spent
sixty years in holy office, wrote a definitive work, ‘The Grammar of Plainsong’
and apparently only once left Stanbrook Abbey in all of that time.
Quite
why a nun and two atheists should have become such close, if long-range friends
is the tale that Hugh Whitemore has set out to tell, through the judicious
editing and ordering of their correspondence.
Shaw,
Brother Bernard to Dame Laurentia, says much about his work and almost
literally mortally offends her by publishing ‘The Black Girl in Search of God’.
The
Dame always has her religion on her brain but offers helpful insights that
leave even these atheists wondering about religious faith and grateful for her
prayers.
From
an opening story about Tolstoy, it is apparent that Cockerell delights in name-dropping
but proves a genuine friend to each of the others and eventually they help to
sustain each other in times of pleasure and hardship.
Scott
Higlett’s excellent set is attractive but also has hidden depths. It is
ostensibly a comfortable study shared by Michael Pennington’s stiff Cockerell
and Roy Dotrice playing a Shaw looking every bit a country gent, complete with
plus-twos. Patricia Routledge, in full nun’s get-up, makes her appearances
through the French windows.
The
designer has ensured that the windows have an ecclesiastical leaning, while the
artwork favours the Pre-Raphaelites and wallpaper and curtains look like
William Morris fabrics, appropriate wince Cockerell was once his secretary.
The
pacing rarely rises above pedestrian, particularly in the first half and the
humour, as one might expect, is generally gentle. Having said that, there is a
moment just after the interval which is so funny that is worth the admission
price on its own.
Over
two-and-a-half hours of the play, the lives of these three, quite different
eccentrics are laid out for their audience, and philosophy and theology are
debated by intellectuals with varied viewpoints.
It
all sounds a little dull and worthy and at times it can be, since there is rarely
any narrative drive. However, the personalities eventually shine through the
structure and one begins to warm to and eventually mourn the losses of these
three avid correspondents.
While
‘The Best of Friends’ would probably work better as a radio play, thanks to
moving performances from three highly experienced and much loved actors, it
wins over its audience, who by the end, are impressed by far more than the
novelty of seeing Hyacinth Bucket in a wimple!
The Daily
Telegraph,
If
you wanted to put a bolshie teenager off theatre for life, I don’t think you
could do much better than take him to ‘The Best of Friends’. For two and a half
hours almost nothing happens beyond a great deal of civilised talk. The actors
have all long since qualified for their bus passes, sex barely gets a look-in
and there’s no violence at all. Oh, and one of the characters is a Benedictine
nun.
What
could be more remote from John Osborne contemptuously referred to as the “yoof”
of today, the yoof most theatres seem so cravenly anxious to court? But for
those of us subsiding happily into the not inconsiderable consolations of
middle age, this defiantly unfashionable, heroically unexciting drama is a
treat – wise, witty, civilised and touching, qualities that are at a premium,
indeed often downright despised, in these tawdry times.
Hugh
Whitemore’s play was first stages in the
Michael
Pennington takes over Gielgud’s old role as
The
piece is adapted from their letters and writings, and is above all a
celebration of a three-way friendship that endured for more than 25 years until
Shaw’s death in 1950.
But
the play touches on a wide range of subjects, from the way of life in a
Benedictine order to the joy of returning spring, from the perils and comforts
of age to the mysteries of God and faith.
The
evening is not entirely devoid of drama. The friendship between Shaw and the
nun was violently interrupted when GBS published ‘Adventures of the Black Girl
in her Search for God’, which in its sceptical approach to Christianity greatly
offended Sister Laurentia. At the interval, it looks as though the bitter
breach may prove permanent.
I
also found myself fascinated, and slightly repelled, by the character of
Cockerell. He seems to have collected friends rather in the manner in which he
collected books, as objects to possess and boast about. Indeed you get the chilling impression that
he cared more about his famous friends than he did about his ailing wife and
young children.
In
Roose Evan’s production, set in an enviably cosy study, the actors sometimes
address each other directly and at other soliloquise to the audience. All three
prove highly responsive to the piece’s subtle shifts in mood, and towards the
end a moving sense of mortality becomes ever more pervasive as the characters
near the end of their lives.
Roy
Dotrice is a delight as Shaw, capturing his love of paradox and mischief, but
also finding warmth and generous human sympathy in the man that wasn’t always
apparent in his plays. Shaw’s with shines throughout, but there is an
unexpected spirituality in this performance too.
Michael
Pennington subtly suggests the creepier side of Cockerell’s character, as well
as holding the evening together as narrator, but Patricia Routledge is perhaps
a touch too roguish as the nun, at times almost honking with pleasure like a
sea-lion at feeding time. I would have welcomed a deeper suggestion of
contemplative wisdom, but it’s a minor blemish on a quiet but richly rewarding
evening.
Evening Standard,
Now
that the pleasure of conveying news, views and feelings by posted letters has
given way to the impersonal brevities of the emails and text message, ‘The Best
of Friends’ serves a rare, nostalgic purpose.
Hugh
Whitemore’s adaptation of the 20th-century letters that passed for
decades between George Bernard Shaw, Sir Sydney Cockerell and Dame Laurentia
McLachlan, the Abbess of an enclosed convent enables us to appreciate bygone
ages: telephones still rang rarely then, close friendships or even love affairs
were sustained by letter and could survive death, thanks to their epistolary
expression.
Strictly
speaking this entertainment, which marked Sir John Gielgud’s farewell to the
theatre as Sir Sydney in 1988, lacks plot and action. Yet for all the courteous
trivialities and high-minded gossip of their correspondence, dramatised within
Simon Higlett’s evocative recreation of Cockerell’s study, there develops a
touching sense of friendship ripening, harvested and stoically declining in the
fadings of old age.
James
Roose Evans, Hampstead’s founder in 1959 and its first artistic director,
celebrates a long overdue return to his theatre in a production imaginatively
if perhaps too frequently animated with business.
Miss
Routledge’s irritatingly winsome, chuckling Abbess stores apples, delivers
posies and even escapes her grilled confines to visit London and Michael Pennington’s
Sir Sydney, whom this versatile actor makes the model of antique elegance and
civility.
Roy
Dotrice’s superbly flamboyant, iconoclastic Shaw injects welcome touches of
radicalism and vitality. Of drama there is just a flash: arrogant Dame
Laurentia displays a religious intolerance and eagerness to censor that strike
familiar bells today when she demands Shaw arrange for the pulping of what she
considers his blasphemous novel, ‘Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search
for God’.
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