Cinema
Poetess
Ted Whitehead
Stevie (Classic, Oxford Street) 'Are you enjoying it, dear?' says Freddie to Stevie in the middle of intercourse. Or so we learn from Stevie's tirade against him the next day. Freddie is baffled; he can't understand her rage at such passion-killing gentility, But was she enjoying it? And was this her oniy experience of sex, apart from a Student Hugh Whitemore, s Screenplay based on his play and the works of Stevie Smith, doesn't tell us. Yet the questions are pertinent to an exploration of the mind of a poet so haunted by loneliness and death. Stevie (AA) is a fine, sensitive study, obviously conceived in love, but too discreet by half. There could hardly be less promising film material than the life of a woman whose Chief passion was boredom, resulting in or from -a routine of uneventual ordinariness. Peggy Smith (nicknamed Stevie after the pekey Steve Donoghue) was born in Hull 411902, and when she was four moved with her parents to Avondale Road in Palmers Green. Here she stayed for over sixty years, Shared, after her parents' death, with a maiden aunt. After the aunt died, she look lived alone for a period until moving to Devon to here after a sister who had had a stroke. ; here she herself fell ill and died of a brain tumour in 1971. Throughout her life she was writing poetry, both at home and at the Publisher's office where she was employed. The film is tantalisingly short on facts and dates, largely ignoring the external details of her publishing and literary careers to Concentrate on evoking the personality and Tn. :0 0 d s that lie behind the poetry. In form it s a recollection by a literary friend, played ,,with great dignity and affection by Trevor 'toward, who stands amid the Palmers Green dustsheets and announces: 'All aboard for a trip to the suburbs.' Glenda ackson as Stevie, trim and dowdy, but with Impressive clarity and force, recalls h. er childhood the elderly neighbours warning ,.ner of White Slavers in the area, the dreadful accidie of schooldays, her parents' Unhappy marriage and her own indifference to her loving father. Teenage sex lesso. ns had left her feeling sick, and yet 'Copulation Is first class fun, but how do you fin. d a mate?' She shudders at that leitmotif of suburban girls, 'Oh if only I were married!, When Freddie overplayed by IvicCowen as a flannelled fool Alec pro pose s, She turns him down, preferring the freedom 9,,f.friendship. 'You'll die alone,' he says, as It were not marriage itself that created the loneliness both of the spinster and of the Widow. Stevie slashes her wrists, recovers and thereafter devotes herself to her poetry and her aunt.
Stevie's attacks on the middle class for their persistent snobbishness and pursuit of privilege are balanced by her attacks on intellectual revolutionaries who scoff at people's absorption in family matters. She herself is pretty self-absorbed by now, knocking back the gin, chainsmoking, and reading Gibbon and Agatha Christie. She gives a hilarious account of receiving the Queen's Medal for Poetry, when she went to the palace and met the Queen, who struggled desperately to discuss poetry with her. And there's a very funny scene illustrating how, now a celebrity, Stevie has begun to exploit her literary admirers. Given such undramatic material, it seems almost perverse that the film should narrate rather than enact the few crises that occur, but perhaps this is due to the stage origins of the piece. Glenda Jackson's renderings of the poems are a delight, but the language that animates the stage can paralyse the movie, and by the end I found myself itching to get out of that cosy little parlour.
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