Home truths
Kenneth Hurren
Inevitably there were those of my colleagues in this dodge, desperate as ever to avoid alienating the Pimlico proletariat, who came to scoff and stayed to jeer at William Douglas Home's new piece, The Douglas Cause, at the Duke of York's, in which he digs up the roots of his noble family tree. The impression conveyed by some of the critiques was that the author might have disposed of the serial rights in his material to the Horse and Gentry, but that, as a play for general consumption, it wasn't likely to stir the citizenry out of the grogshops.
They may be right, but there is, I think, something quite irresistibly piquant about the notion that our Foreign Secretary may be descended, not from the braw and hairy Caledonian chieftains who have hitherto bedevilled our imaginations as we regarded the spry punctilio of his diplomatic maneouvres, but from a French glass-blower. His heart is not in the Highlands, as we thought, but in Les Halles. It adds a startling literalness to his ministerial title, and it equips him, what's more, with a simple, valid reason (doubtless the envy of his Cabinet colleagues) to enthuse over the EEC.
The story goes (and it is, I take it, the authentic stuff and not some timely banana oil that young Willie has dreamed up to anoint his brother's image), the story, as I was saying, goes that the twins allegedly born to Lady Jane Douglas in 1748 were probably changelings, picked up for a few francs from French working folk at the time of her ' confinement ' in Paris. The lady was, after all, fifty years old; only one dubious witness could attest to the pregnancy and the births; and it was known that two local infants had been purchased by someone and had subsequently disappeared. One of them died. When the other came to his inheritance, the next heir, the Duke of Hamilton, raised the question of his legitimacy and a convocation of Edinburgh judges sustained the objection, only to have their decision reversed by the House of Lords.
The play about this eighteenth-century brouhaha is set in 1910, at a dinner party given by the Earl of Home at Douglas Castle, when the old feud with the Hamiltons has been patched up. When the conversation turns from the grouse moors, an avuncular old judge (played by Andrew Cruickshank), a bit jingled on the brandy, inquires about the ancient cause célèbre and later, in post-prandial slumber, dreams that all the vital figures in the case are appearing before him for a re-trial.
Mr Douglas Home's own view of the affair is implicit in the judge's conclusions, though perhaps it was foreshadowed a little earlier with the appearance of the Earl of Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice mainly influential in the House of Lords ruling. Mansfield was the man whose advice to judges was, "Give your decisions, never your reasons; your decisions may be right, your reasons are sure to be wrong," or words to that effect. Here, calling him from beyond the grave into the judge's dream, Mr Douglas Home has him giving his reasons at considerable and lively length — almost as though to prove the wisdom of his engaging dictum.
It all struck me as a decently entertaining re-investigation of essentially private family history, given a wider interest by the present eminence of the family. I don't know whether Sir Alec is gratified by the findings; at the least, I daresay, he may be relieved, in the light of his most pressing negotiations, that it is only a bit of French dressing and not a touch of the tarbrush that has been turned up in his genealogy.
A fictitious Foreign Secretary figures in the Mermaid revival of the late Bernard Shaw's 1938 'political extravaganza,' Geneva, now performed for the first time in London with the additional act that Shaw interpolated — with a remarkable resistance to the emotionalism of the time — in 1945. The Foreign Secretary, parodially treated but nevertheless frequently indistinguishable from the real thing, is urbanely personated by Ernest Clark, and there are other commendable performances from George Benson, Barbara Ferris, Toby Robins and others. As drama it is not much; but as a larkish conversation piece for characteristic Shavian puppets it is generally stimulating; and the plea on behalf of supranationalism, discernible among its wayward fancies and cheerful lampoons, is cogent and compassionate.
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