Drama

John Whiting's new-found play

Eric Salmon

Strange as it may seem, ten years after his death, there is a new, complete, full-length stage play by John Whiting. Only a handful of people seem to know about it, but it exists, nevertheless. It is unpublished and has never been performed. Yet it is by no means negligible.

In 1957 Heinemann published The Plays of John Whiting, a volume which contains Saint's Day, A "Penny for a Song and Marching Song. Whiting himself wrote the Introduction and in it he said: "There was an earlier play, The Conditions of Agreement, which has been destroyed. These, with one last play (The Gates of Summer) are my complete output for the theatre. No unproduced or unfinished plays exist."

Whether John Whiting really believed this to be true or whether the statement was his way of officially disowning early work which he felt no longer spoke with b:.s voice, it is now quite impossible to determine, but certainly the statement later proved to be inaccurate. The Conditions of Agreement was, in fact, found after his death and was given a posthumous production at Bristol Little Theatre. Its typescript showed it to have been written in 1946. And next to it on the shelf in John Whiting's library at his Sussex home was another typescript with the same date on its cover.

This is the new Whiting play. Inexplicably, it was omitted from The Collected Plays of John Whiting, edited by Ronald Hayman and published by Heinemann in 1969. In that same year, I saw the script for the first time and had the opportunity of reading it. I had undertaken to write a full-length critical study of all Whiting's works, both dramatic and nondramatic, and had been given much gracious and valuable help by his widow, who had allowed me to examine all Whiting's manuscripts and papers. Among them was the unknown play.

Its title is No More A-Roving. (Whiting was particularly fond of Byron and wrote into The Gates of Summer a character who more than faintly resembles both Byron and Whiting. I found on his bookshelves over fifty volumes on Byron — biographies, criticism, scandal and the poems, including the variorum edition of Don Juan.) Mrs Whiting tells me that No More A-Roving was offered to the Northampton Repertory Theatre in 1946, was rejected by them and never offered to anyone else.

Not the least astonishing thing about it is that No More A-Roving, The Conditions of Agreement and the first draft of Saint's Day were all written in that same year and this was less than a full year after the completion of the novel, Not a Foot of Land. Annus mirabilis. So even if the new play with the Byronic title had no intrinsic merit — which is not the case — it would aoquire an importance from its context and history.

Its great fascination is in the combination of a very conventional popularentertainment style with an inner spirit of uneasy melancholy, a spirit imperfectly realised as yet but on its way to becoming that unique blend of idealism and cynical despair which we would later recognise as Whiting's particular contribution to the theatre. Whiting himself was an actor in provincial rep. (to be precise, with the White Rose Players in Harrogate) when the play was written and the form and frame of this, his first play, clearly owes a good deal to the endless string of flatly naturalistic 'drawing-room comedies' in which, to meet the taste of the times, he must have been condemned to appear.

The plot is founded on that staunch and stalwart stand-by of those days, the weekend visit. In every third play of the 'twenties, 'thirties, and 'forties, someone was always down at somebody's place for the weekend: Coward made hay of the idea. But Whiting's weekend is different. Only three people are there, except for a comic servant called Willie Yeats (who is a fifteen-year-old girl). Angus Learoyd has invited Benedict Clare and Kirsty Winton to spend the weekend with him. Before the war, they had all three been devoted and inseparable friends until the partnership had been mysteriously dissolved by the sudden disappearance first of Kirsty and then of Angus. Benedict, who had secretly been in love with Kirsty, had been desolate and a bit hurt at being left alone, but had never discovered where or why his two friends had gone. Then the war began and effectively kept all three apart for eight years: now we see them meet again, as a result of Angus's invitation, for the first time since the war. Angus and Kirsty had, in fact, gone off together eight years before, though they concealed this from Benedict. They had lived together for just two weeks, quarrelled violently and separated. In the intervening eight years they have neither seen nor written to each other. Yet when they meet now it is as if only a day or two had passed: they are utterly at ease with each other and spontaneously in love with each other again immediately. They spend the night together, letting Benedict now into the secret they should have told him eight years ago — and by morning they have again mutually decided, this time without quarrelling, that though their feelings for each other have not changed, on the level of everyday events, it won't work. It is not the genuineness of their feelings or the reality of their love that is in question: there are things which, by the best tests of both intellect and intuition, one recognises as perfect but which are yet not compatible with the messy business of trying to stay alive and reasonably comfortable.

The theme came back over and over again in Whiting — and had, even when No More A-Roving was written, already appeared in Not a Foot of Land: the passion for the absolute — a belief, a system of justice and social order, a personal relationship, something that could measure up to man's highest aspiration and yet live, unsullied and complete, in the mundane, everyday world. The dark side of this passion in Whiting's work leads, as with all Romantics, to death: death as an alternative preferable to compromise. The lighter side leads to the wryly cynical acceptance of the world as it depressingly is — see the description of a : workers ' holiday' in the unfinished Noman. Whiting's progress, a tortured one, was from the too-lush expression of this passion in Not a Foot of °Land and the over-simplified statement of it in No More A-Roving to the grittier, terser, far more complex (yet still not entirely satisfactory) expression of it in The Devils. The play we really needed to see, the one that might have carried this progress to a triumphant fulfilment in the creation of an indisputable masterpiece, was the one that Whiting, restored to the theatre after a period of disillusion, would have written next after The Devils, had his death not supervened.

So the missing, neglected play is not that masterpiece but the obverse of it, the first tentative step taken. It is neither as theatrically disturbing nor as genuinely dramatic as The Conditions of Agreement, its companion-piece from the same year, but it avoids both pompousness and ponderousness. It has something of the teacup tinkle of the genre from which it derived but though slight, it is not trite. And it is slyly aware of its humble origins: as witness two little, but significant, comments in its opening stage directions — "The room itself has great charm: it was obviously designed for no other reason than to contain the delightful happenings of the next twenty-four hours "; and "She is twenty-seven: a gracious, humorous and lovely creature, dressed as befits her part in this comedy." These are indications that Whiting was already moving towards the rejection of the arid dead-end of naturalism. A stage is a stage, he is saying, not a room. A painting is not a photograph: it is greater than a photograph. Art must be artificial if it is to have any profundity. Reporting is for reporters, not for artists. He knew it even then.

But academic demonstration and argument apart, the play would have two very solid virtues in the theatre. The first is that it displays over and over again Whiting's already acute sense of what creating a part for an actor means. Kirsty is potentially a star role, with all those charismatic qualities that the over-worked phrase implies; Angus and Benedict have many moments and speeches that would be riveting in the theatre; and Willie Yeats, although of the general line of comic servants of the period, is also something more: she is a genuine eccentric, the forerunner of those delicious comic eccentrics of A Penny for a Song and the sombre and compelling eccentrics of Saint's Day and The Conditions of Agreement. The play's second_ theatrical virtue is that it is genuinely witty and funny. Not that a play has to be funny: but it is better if one that sets out to be so Can bring it off with grace and deftness and lightness of touch and still retain its essential seriousness of purpose. No More A-Roving does this without descending to banality, facetiousness or mere sentimentality. Here and there the dramaturgical machinery creaks a little and one half expects a ghostly voice to whisper " Tennis, anyone?" but this is an occasional lapse only, not sufficient to mar the whole or even to irritate one very much.

Already the distinctive charm is there; and the pervading melancholy, even in a funny play; and the questions. Whiting was fascinated by the way the whirligig of time brings in his revenges; and his regrets; and his ironies. Kirsty says to Angus, when they are saying goodbye: "I have always found great delight in you. And it was that delight combined with a desire to please and a friendliness that made us." Angus sombrely asks her: " Made us what we are or what we were?" and before she can answer him (if she was even going to try) he looks at her suddenly and says: " You are standing there as I remember you one morning, but you are saying things you have never said before." What makes those moments of significant variation, when the circle which we have daily been traversing suddenly becomes a spiral, up or down? What makes those moments? Where do they come from? This is no ordinary drawing-room comedy.

Surely this play should be seen both on the stage and in print? It has the history of an era and the dawn of a major talent in its pages. And is a good play to boot.

Eric Salmon is Professor of Drama at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. His full-length critical study of John Whiting will be published next year.

Footnote: As we go to press we learn that a London management is interested in No More A-Roving, and that a production is planned for later this year.