Theatre 1
Collected Stories (Theatre Royal, Haymarket) The Chiltern Hundreds (Vaudeville)
Pupil power
Sheridan Morley
We have been here before, and often: Donald Margulies's Collected Stories at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket is a curious mix of All About Eve and Oleanna. To a Green- wich Village apartment, described by the author as ascetic, but designed by John Gunter as a book-lined home of consider- able luxury, comes a young literature stu- dent (radiantly played by Anne-Marie Duff) to visit her professor, a somewhat cranky spinster equally magically portrayed by Helen Mirren. Over six years and six scenes from 1990, we watch their relation- ship develop, and guess what? The once- timid pupil overtakes her mistress amid the bestsellers, and commits the final crime of turning her one true and secret love affair into a novel. A life and a career have thus been stolen, and perhaps even destroyed; but do we really care and how much does it matter except perhaps to them?
As if realising, albeit rather too late, that there's a certain lack of original plot and energy here, Margulies introduces into the last scene two new possibilities; the old teacher may now be dying, and yet she may still have just enough strength left to get the novel withdrawn from publication. Pre- cisely how she plans to do this is never explained, and nor do we ever discover whether she really is about to leave us; a conversation piece reverts to being just that, and I suspect that the play's long off- Broadway life may have had as much to do with local reverence for Uta Hagen, who created the role of the old author, than with a distinctly shaky drama.
It is not that the play lacks plausibility; the dramatist himself says that the idea came from a problem Stephen Spender once had with a young author who wished to make over his early life as a novel, but from The Master Builder across a century there have been dozens of other plays on the theme of students overtaking their mentors and somehow destroying them or their careers in the process.
Not so much well-written as well-remem- bered from countless other scripts in this well-explored territory, Collected Stories goes through all the usual hoops about memory as property, privacy of the individ- ual being denied if that individual happens to be any kind of public figure, genera- tional struggles, professional loyalties and the multitude of ways in which private lives can be turned into public pulp. To his cred- it, Margulies remains neatly astride the fence here; his two characters are neither heroines nor villains even to themselves, and he dwells as much on their individual defects as on their virtues. He is clearly in love with both of them, and Mirren and Duff admirably ensure that we share his love; these are at heart two people doing their best to be true to their own lights, and, although at a dinner party one might soon want to move them on to a slightly more original or intriguing area of conver- sation than that of whose life is it anyway, there can be no doubt that this slow-burn- ing, sometimes clunky set piece neatly rounds up virtually all the arguments for and against biography, however lightly or effectively disguised as fiction When The Chiltern Hundreds first opened a three-year run in the West End of 1947, its author William Douglas Home, brother of the subsequent Tory prime min- ister and foreign secretary, used regularly to make speeches remarking that 'we need a little comedy now that Labour is . in power', and his was certainly a durable lit- tle comedy despite the fact that its star, an eccentric comic genius called A.E. Matthews, used in the intervals to fall into such a deep sleep that he was once report- ed dead to the stage manager. `I think,' said Matty gravely to the callboy who had found him, `next time it might be better if you simply announced that you thought Mr Matthews might be dead.'
So we are not here dealing with what might be termed contemporary theatre, though it would be as well to recall also that at the time of this, his first and greatest hit Douglas Home, always more subversive than he is given credit for, had just been released from a year in jail for refusing to obey a wartime bombing instruction which would have resulted in civilian deaths.
His play about that, Now Barrabas, was indeed running in the West End alongside these Chiltern Hundreds, so we are not sim- ply returning to some unimportant sub- Lonsdale country house-party joker, but to a dramatist of considerable interest and complexity, richly ripe for rediscovery after years of unjust neglect.
All credit, therefore, to Edward Fox, arguably like Matty the greatest understat- ed comic genius of his stage generation, and his director, the veteran farceur Ray Cooney, for giving us another look at the Scots castle where a dotty old Earl (played by Fox as a dyspeptic walrus and closely modelled on the playwright's father, just at the time when Nancy Mitford was using all her bizarre relatives to similar comic pur- pose in novels) and his faithful, taciturn butler are trying to come to terms with the new social realities. Like Noel Coward's Easy Virtue and Relative Values, The Chiltern Hundreds is all about household staff getting above themselves, in this case so far that a butler becomes a Member of Parliament, and the only surviving housemaid gets engaged to her young master.
But this is 1947, and so they return happi- ly below stairs at the final curtain, remark- ing that they also serve who only stand and wait; pre-war social order is precariously restored, but Cooney's triumph here is to keep the plot moving as fast as a Feydeau farce, pausing only briefly for topical jokes of the period about the great winter freeze and the staff problem, not to mention com- munism and the colonies. The castle walls are now admittedly a little shaky, but the double-act of Edward Fox as the bewil- dered Lord Lieutenant, forever shooting rabbits through the windows of his stately home (often forgetting to open them first), and Moray Watson as his impeccable, worldly-wise butler is little short of brilliant.
The rest of the cast struggle with unreward- ing roles, but on Simon Higlett's splendidly baronial set The Chiltern Hundreds works now as historical hilarity, and will I hope lead us back Home to other and still more intriguing plays of his.
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