It’s a record breaker. The Trafalgar Studio is staging a rare revival of Christopher Hampton’s breakthrough play, written when he was 18, which made him in 1966 the youngest writer ever to have his work staged in the West End. This record has now stood for so long that it could probably do with a lie-down.
The plot, meticulously fashionable and youth-orientated, focuses on an unrequited affair between Ian and his flatmate Jimmy. Hampton’s conception of personality is underdeveloped. And overdeveloped, too. Most of his characters are handsome, vague, middle-class numbskulls, posh little tadpoles wriggling around a cosy pond. But the central character, Ian, is a brilliant study of brooding, adolescent misogyny. Fiercely intelligent, magnificently charismatic and overwhelmed by loneliness and self-doubt, Ian might have become a world-class political psychopath.
But this is the 1960s so he frets about his sexuality and yearns forlornly for handsome swains who give him nothing in return. Orphaned at 12, he spent his teenage years living with his detested grandparents. ‘How are your family?’ someone asks him casually. ‘Dead, mostly,’ he says. These flashes of exuberant cruelty are the play’s best feature. And Hampton’s examination of self-lacerating homosexuality is astonishingly mature.
But the plot doesn’t quite hold together. In the second act, Jimmy’s mother, a gorgeous and sophisticated blonde, develops an inexplicable crush on the wispy, waspish little Ian. They go to bed one drunken evening. Later she comes back begging for more. Yeah, right. Some chance.
Blanche MacIntyre’s direction is crisp and impressively assured but she hasn’t been able to call on first-class acting talents (apart from the excellent Abigail Cruttenden as Jimmy’s mum). None of the background actors leaves any impression and Harry Melling, as Ian, captures the brittle intensity well enough but overdoes the abrasiveness and self-obsession. There’s no warmth, sweetness or levity here. And it’s hard to believe that this vicious little puppy could entertain so many friends and have such a bustling sex life. And the director has let him shout too loudly. Feet away from the audience, in a tiny theatre space, he bawls his lines out in the harshest register his voice can find. At times I needed earplugs.
A title has been found for Mike Leigh’s untitled new play, Grief. The central character, Dorothy (Lesley Manville), is a war widow living in west London in 1958 with her kindly brother Edwin and her morose teenage daughter, Victoria. Very little happens. Edwin retires. Dorothy goes to a party. The cleaner quits. Dorothy takes her O-levels and smokes one cigarette. The pace is defiantly and elaborately slow and yet the tug of reality, the pulse of uncertainty and expectation, draws one ever inward and onward. It’s a play about absences, about suppressions and inversions, about malign energies gathering off-stage. There are longueurs, it’s true, but these are orchestrated with meticulous care to attune the audience to the rhythm of the age. And at this point I admit it’s hard to discuss the play without a) making it sound punishingly dull or b) making myself sound pretentious or c) both. But there we are.
Leigh’s achievement in this painterly marvel is to reveal how a lifetime of sentiment can repose in the smallest domestic detail. A music-hall song murmured nostalgically. A sherry schooner pertly refused. A commemorative salver with the name misspelt. For light relief he introduces us to Dorothy’s old chum, Gertrude, a snobbish bitchy chatterbox played with lethal accuracy by Marion Bailey. And we meet Edwin’s best friend, an eccentric GP who invents his own sawn-off aphorisms. ‘All’s well that ends,’ he keeps quipping. (Excellent work from the hyperactively cheerful David Horovitch.)
And all the time you keep asking yourself where this is heading, what are we here for exactly, and, finally, in the closing minutes, Leigh magically escalates the tension and pushes the drama to the brink of unbearability. The closing scene is as replete with dread and menace as anything Hitchcock ever produced. And the ingenious internal structure is revealed. We understand why the chatterbox is needed and why the garrulous doctor has to be there, too.
This is a wonderful and deeply felt work of art. And the middle-class setting, thank goodness, means that Leigh spares us that satirical strain of prole-baiting which he calls ‘lamentation’ and which everyone else calls contempt. And though this is a great production it might be improved with a simple adjustment. Leigh is aiming here, fairly and squarely, at an audience sufficiently mature to know what TTFN stands for (‘Ta ta for now’), and these loyal oldsters, with their Grade II-listed hip joints, deserve a bit of a leg-stretcher halfway through. Before it goes on tour I hope the show receives the blessing of an interval.
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