Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’. The theatre boasts a Resident Academic and an eccentric register of patrons including ‘Victoria Biggs, Euan Borland and the Duchess of Cambridge (pub)’.
Currently it’s sifting the 1920s for treasure. Others have prospected here before. Ben Travers’s bourgeois farces no longer entertain us because middle-class morality has changed too much in the past 90 years. Frederick Lonsdale may stand a better chance. His play, On Approval, opened in the West End in 1927 and ran for over a year. It was twice filmed. It’s a neat, witty and slightly contrived comedy in which hard-up aristocrats compete to marry low-born women with pots of cash. This inverted arrangement — toffs grovelling to commoners — is perfectly attuned to the democratic values of the 1920s. Naturally it tickles our sensibilities too.
Lonsdale’s premise has the familiar lay-out of a BBC sitcom: four bickering eccentrics are trapped in a domestic setting. We meet George, 12th Duke of Bristol, an arrogant and penniless parasite who faces bankruptcy unless he can marry Helen, the daughter of a wealthy pickle magnate. (Pickle! The details are beautifully calculated to corrode the dignity of the upper classes.) Meanwhile George’s best friend Richard, a hard-up plodder, has caught the eye of Maria, a rich widow whose earnings would guarantee him a life of luxury. But she insists that he prove his worth by accompanying her for a month at her sleet-lashed Gothic castle in Scotland. George and Helen come along for the ride and the two become four.
Disaster strikes. Maria’s Scottish staff resign en masse and leave the pampered southerners to fend for themselves. Their failings and eccentricities clash like flint boulders in a heavy tide. Maria’s supreme ill temper turns Richard into a model of bovine obedience but she finds his servility irksome rather than charming. He rapidly falls out of love with her money. George struts around in beautifully tailored plus-fours, demanding piping meals and iced cocktails, and behaving as if he’s occupying the finest suite at the Ritz. Soured by his arrogance, Helen tells him that his ancient dukedom was purchased by a devious ancestor who pimped out his daughter to a royal patron. He may act posh, she insinuates, but he’s a prostitute’s bastard. This raw observation would fit neatly into a Marxist tract denouncing the feudal principle, and it’s fascinating to find such a poisonous arrow in a Jazz Age comedy. The key to it lies in the author’s circumstances.
Lonsdale was a smart kid from nowhere whose brains and charm endeared him to upper-crust loafers and drop-outs. He used to sponge off chinless wonders for months on end while writing West End hits that lampooned their ghastly behaviour. And they loved him for it. The more cutting his attacks, the more pleased they were by his honesty. (And the truths he spoke to them directly can hardly have been worse than the whispers exchanged below-stairs by their servants. So his plays were, in a sense, a safety valve that facilitated the harmless release of toxic materials.)
Lonsdale has a great knack for making his grotesque aristos seem rather adorable. George’s milksop snootiness is captured brilliantly by Peter Sandys-Clarke, whose regal bearing and gleaming, dead-fish eyes are entirely devoid of regard for anyone but himself. Daniel Hill offers fine support as the put-upon puppy-dog Richard, and Louise Calf’s Helen is full of unexpected steel. But the show belongs to Sara Crowe as the magnificently acidic Maria. Crowe’s instinct for comedy binds the company together and turns an interesting curiosity into a winning night out. One last detail must be added to Lonsdale’s intriguing story. His grandsons are the actors James and Edward Fox.
At the Arcola, a fictionalised version of the notorious Gibraltar shoot-out of March 1988. Three IRA suspects were killed by SAS gunmen who believed they were about to detonate a bomb. The slain men were later found to be unarmed, and a local witness claimed to have seen them attempting to surrender before they were killed. Fascinating controversies crowd in on these events. Had the British army succumbed to the terrorist culture it was appointed to eliminate? Did the witness, being Spanish, feel herself a victim of British colonialism and allow this prejudice to influence her testimony? The show aims high but suffers from a lack of dramatic purpose. And the peculiar decision to clothe real events in fictional garb deprives it of immediacy. The fascinating questions of Gibraltar remain just questions.
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