The Late Middle Classes
Donmar, until 17 July
Lilies of the Land
Arts, until 17 July
Plotless plays are usually the work of beginners or nutcases. Very occasionally they’re produced by seasoned theatrical wizards. Simon Gray belongs to the third type. The Late Middle Classes is an absorbing and often hilarious portrait of the buttoned-up English bourgeoisie of the 1950s. Celia and her pathologist husband Charles have pitched up in Hayling Island but they can’t wait to swap its provincial torpor for the glamour of London. Their big move is dependent on their son Holly’s ability to get a full scholarship to a public school. His musical talent is being encouraged by the creepy Mr Brownlow, an Austrian refugee who moonlights as a composer, and whose excitable manner at the piano stool hints at forbidden lusts. Rationing has reduced the family to sub-Soviet levels of penury. Supper consists of powdered egg fried in lard, so poor old Celia has to grovel to the neighbours in the hope of cadging an extra pat of butter.
Very little happens. Holly gets his exam results. Mr Brownlow keeps his trousers on. Mild infidelities are confessed to by the married couple. That’s about it. The play’s interest lies in the subtle and unusual portrait it offers of the upwardly mobile English classes just after the war.
Celia is an impassioned, frustrated, tennis-playing minx who schmoozes her friends over the phone and then tears them to ribbons as soon as the receiver goes down. The gin bottle is never more than six inches from her manicured fingers. Helen McCrory plays the role as if it were a classic of 20th-century theatre, a kind of Judith Bliss without the perfumed smuttiness. Her vitality and thwarted charm are captured quite beautifully. As her husband, Peter Sullivan delivers another of his exquisitely measured and formidably funny essays in understated satire. This is the most acutely observed comic performance you’ll see anywhere in the West End (and it’s a double pleasure to say so as I’m told Mr Sullivan responds to my positive notices by phoning colleagues and inviting them to share in the good news). It’s true that he mumbles some of his lines but only as a rebuke to those unwise enough to buy cheap seats at the rear of the circle.
Charles and Celia offer the internal view of a traditional English marriage while their immigrant neighbours, Mr Brownlow and his mother Ellie, provide an external take on England as a land of hypocritical gentility and a superficial ‘niceness’ that conceals a cold and superstitious tribalism. This double perspective gives the picture a fascinating richness. Gray is often thought of as an archetypal middle-brow English playwright but here he shows a surprising range and profundity. Robert Glenister, as Mr Brownlow, evokes the manic desperation of a homosexual sincerely struggling to master his passion for schoolboy flesh. That a paedophile should be presented as a victim, and even a sort of hero, gives an indication of Gray’s singularity and humaneness.
This is a very tricky play to get right and David Leveaux’s production safely crosses every hurdle. Not only does the script lack action, its structure is strangely off balance, too, and there are clumsy bursts of piano music which interrupt the dramatic flow. The crucial role of Ellie, which provides much of the play’s imaginative oddness and texture, might easily dissolve into a series of grating eruptions but it’s given perfect coherence by Eleanor Bron’s forceful and touching grandeur. A real cracker this show, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Over at the Arts Theatre there’s a slice of oral history about the Women’s Land Army. During the second world war the rolling English countryside was suddenly visited by cohorts of displaced typists and factory girls in khaki breeches who reaped and mowed and tilled and sowed. This is a well acted show, which seems content not to overstep the limits of the documentary format.
We hear how the girls hobnobbed quite happily with allies and POWs alike. Each race conforms to stereotype. The Italians are romantic and lazy. The Germans are melancholy and homesick. Raucous Americans are forever tossing bars of chocolate from the backs of speeding jeeps. The home nation comes off worst. Some farmers expected their hapless Cinderellas to toil for ten hours in the turnip patch in return for a dollop of yesterday’s gruel served in the freezing darkness of a candle-less kitchen. Randy hillbillies regarded the land girls as a welcome substitute for sheep. The 1,000-yard sprint across a pat-strewn meadow was an aptitude many a press-ganged shepherdess was forced to acquire. When the war ended most returned to their previous lives. A few married Americans. Some married farmers. Plenty, one imagines, never set foot in the countryside again.
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