The Guardian 15th
March 1997, Michael Billington
We talk a lot
about political theatre. Very few plays, however, deal with the way the
power-structure actually operates: Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Schiller’s Wallenstein,
Trevor Griffith’s Occupations, David Edgar’s The Shape of the Table
leap to mind. To that list one should add Harley Granville Barker’s Waste, one
of the best political plays of the century and one that gives Peter Hall’s new
tenancy of the Old Vic a tremendous send-off.
Waste, dealing
with a radical politician destroyed by private scandal, had a famously
chequered history. Granville Barker’s original version, written in 1907, was
banned by the Lord Chamberlain: an act of political censorship masquerading as
moral indignation. As Penelope Gilliatt once pointed out, “In terms of sexual
conventionality, the play commits no more offence than a Victorian melodrama.”
But the ban helped to kill off Barker’s adventurous management of the Royal
Court. In 1920 the play was finally licensed and Barker took the opportunity to
re-write it in the light of recent political events. It is this 1926 version
that Peter Hall currently presents.
But why is the
play so powerful? Partly because it deals with the intersection of politics and
morality. Henry Trebell, and Independent MP, is the architect of a Bill to
disestablish the Church of England and to use its funds to finance new schools
and colleges. The Tories, expecting to regain power after an election, plan to
absorb Trebell into the Cabinet and appropriate the Bill. But when Trebell has
a fling with a married woman who dies after aborting his child, the Bill is
scuppered and Trebell discarded.
On one level, the
play is about a tragic flaw in the English character: possibly one in Granville
Barker’s own. Politically, Trebell is an idealist: emotionally he is heartless.
He is fired by the idea of turning unwanted country houses and abbeys into new
universities; yet he casually seduces Amy O’Connell, discards her instantly
and, even after her death, brutally dismisses her as “a trull”. Granville
Barker pins down the divorce between ideas and sensibilities that runs right
through English life: something Michael Pennington’s superb performance as
Trebell perfectly catches. There is an astonishing moment when, having learned
that Amy is bearing his child, he returns to the practical business of
political manoeuvre with almost schoolboy relish. The Bill, you suddenly
realise, is his real baby: the one that he is most anxious not to see aborted.
But Granville
Barker, who spent much of his life on committees, also understands the dynamics
of power; and his play’s most compelling scene is the one that shows the
putative Tory MP realising that he will have to jettison Trebell to hold his
Cabinet together: Trebell is not so much ruined by scandal – the silence of the
dead woman’s husband is easily bought – as by a battle for the Chancellorship
of the Exchequer: Granville Barker’s real originality lies in showing the
political process at work: in particular,
the way a radical proposal that would transform British life is at the
mercy of private ambition. And it is not difficult to see parallels today with
Tory politicians distancing themselves from Europe in order to improve their
chances of gaining the leadership.
There is one
premise in the play that I find hard to swallow: the idea that the
Conservatives would back a radical Bill to rob the Church of its vested
interests. But what Granville Barker understands is the way politics work; the
way visionary ideas are bedevilled by short-term ambitions and private
character-flaws. Although he inherits the conventions of society melodrama, he
was also a sexual realist. At one point Trebell says to Mrs O’Connell, “When
you arched the instep so, I could hear the stocking rustle” – a sudden touch of
Pinter in a play about high political society.
It is the ideal
work – unfamiliar but analytical of English public life – with which to
kick-start the new Peter Hall regime at the Old Vic. And he directs it with the
same alertness to the interaction of character and ideas he bought to Oscar
Wilde; though I wish he would do something about a downstage chair that, for
those on the extreme left, blocks the view of Denis Quilley’s Machiavellian
Tory leader during a crucial scene.
The casting
throughout is on the highest level: fine performances not only from Pennington
but from Felicity Kendal as his wantonly abandoned mistress, from Anna Carteret
as his celibate sister who, like himself, is a stranger in matters of the
heart, from David Yelland as a doctor privy to political secrets and from Peter
Blythe as a High Church Tory who, as someone says, explains why the symbol of
the early Christians was a fish.
The Old Vic
promised 12 plays performed in repertory over the next 40 weeks: the irony is
that, if it continues to operate on this level, it will offer a direct
challenge to the National Theatre which was largely the brainchild of none
other that Harley Granville Barker.
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