Theatre
A Delicate Balance (Haymarket) A Letter of Resignation (Comedy)
Close to home
Sheridan Morley
When Edward Albee's A Delicate Bal- ance first opened here, in a somewhat aus- tere staging with Peggy Ashcroft at the Aidwych all of 30 years ago, I took its cross-references to be towards Samuel Beckett: the nameless dread which forces a married couple to billet themselves indefi- nitely on their best friends, and above all the bleakness of the vision of Agnes their hostess (Tinally there's nothing there, save rust and bones and the wind'), certainly seemed to point in that direction. It wasn't until, some time later, I came across a bril- liant preface written by Albee to the plays of Noel Coward that I realised we might in fact be a great deal closer to home. What, for instance, is the game of Get the Guests in his Virginia Woolf if not a variant on the agonies inflicted by Coward on his weekenders in Hay Fever? Moreover, when we come to A Delicate Balance, once again we are sharply reminded of Sir Noel: an elegant house in the country, unwel- come guests, an alcoholic sister, a recalci- trant daughter, an all-knowing mother, and a father who has effectively retreated from even his own existence, all are Cowardly stereotypes from the 1920s given sharp and sinister makeovers by Albee. It is the tri- umph of the new production at the Hay- market to have realised these connections still considerably ahead of most Albee scholars; Anthony Page, the director, and his brilliantly elegant designer Carl Toms have come up with a hugely rich staging in which Eileen Atkins and John Standing hold the fort against their own self-destruc- tion while Maggie Smith (as the hard- drinking, concertina-playing sister), Sian Thomas (as the four-time divorcee daugh- ter) and James Laurenson and Annette Crosbie (as the petrified neighbours demanding refuge) fill out the best cast in tendon this season, maybe the best ever seen in any Albee over here.
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On Broadway last season, it was Elaine Ntritch who walked away with this revival as tr,he. sister; but at the Haymarket Maggie Smith faces vastly tougher competition, and at the end of the evening it is the world-weary, infinitely elegant, carefully wasted husband who, in John Standing's mesmerising performance, best captures the spirit of familial and personal self-destruc- tion that lies at the heart of this great play. A Delicate Balance can now be seen as the time-bombed bridge that gets us from Vir- ginia Woolf to Three Tall Women. Where once only marriages imploded in Albee, now it is entire families passing from gen- eration unto generation the destructive art of the dinner party gone poisonous, the hostess off her trolley, the family that only stays together to slay together, even if the victims do turn out to be themselves. There are no nearest or dearest in Albee; and if we are to take home any single message, it is perhaps that there is a surprising amount to be said in favour of the orphanage when you consider most alternatives; the relative values have long since gone into deficit.
At the Comedy, Hugh Whitemore's A Letter of Resignation takes us back to the Profumo scandal of 1963, though it is arguable here that the resignation of the title is also that, both personal and political, of Harold Macmillan whose premiership was fast drawing to a close and speeded on its way by the aftermath of the affair.
We have lately had a lot of documentary drama around the West End, and much of it focused on the politics of the post-war years; but Whitemore's interest is really only in the character of old SuperMac, as played by Edward Fox in another of his startlingly lookalike impressions. Fox's Macmillan, much like his equally impres- sive Edward VIII in the first Abdication drama on television some 20 years ago, is a man in retreat from any kind of reality, holed up in a Scottish castle as the news from Westminster gets worse by the hour and by the messenger. Two of the latter (one from MI5, the other from the Cabinet Office) have arrived to break the news to the old man that his beloved Jack Profumo has finally admitted lying to the House of Commons over his relationship with the model Christine Keeler, and virtually all of Act I is taken up with an unusually plod- ding recapitulation of their story.
Only then does it become clear that Whitemore has another interest: the affair, starting back in the 1920s, between Macmillan's wife Lady Dorothy and anoth- er wayward Tory MP, Bob Boothby. This, in an uncomfortable flashback, emerges as the prime reason for the prime minister's sexual and maybe even social withdrawal from contact with the reality of love and lust, and therefore his inability to under- stand or manoeuvre the Profumo affair to any real advantage. There are some uncharacteristically clumsy moments in A Letter of Resignation, not least a scene in Act II where Lady Dorothy (presumably for our benefit) reads aloud to her husband the letter of the title which we have seen him on stage reading to himself an hour earlier. But at the heart of this docu-drama is Fox's ravaged, retreating premier, already aware that with Profumo goes not only his own career but also a whole way of British life which, for better or worse, at least meant that gentlemen were allowed to play with call-girls without exciting the attentions of a still docile press.
Earlier in the summer, I suggested here that Broadway was going through the most exciting renaissance since the early 1960s, and further evidence of this is already available in the new season; we now have not only Titanic and The Life as major new musicals, but also a breathtakingly lavish staging of The Scarlet Pimpernel, and the triumph of The Triumph of Love, a brand new scoring of an 18th-century Marivaux court frolic. Over here, musicals may be closing down all around us (we have just lost both Maddie and Enter the Guards- man); over there, they have come back into their own and not before time.
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