Theatre
Lettice and Lovage (Globe)
A touch of spice
Christopher Edwards
Peter Shaffer's new comedy opens with the sight of Maggie Smith (playing Miss Lettice Douffet) poised on the staircase of the Grand Hall, Fustian House, Wiltshire. She is an employee of the Preservation Trust, and is about to conclude a guided tour of what must be one of the most boring great houses in the land. One anecdote remains to be told, the tale of how Queen Elizabeth I lost her footing while climbing the staircase one evening, and how the owner of Fustian Hall caught her elbow — thus earning her thanks and a knighthood for his good manners. A true but very boring story. Certainly the shuf- fling, wet tourist party is less than gripped.
We switch immediately to another day in the season. Same house, same guide, but the anecdote has been, well, improved. We are now standing by the Most Famous Staircase in England. A few twirls have been added to the tale. We learn of roast hedgehog served by salivating courtiers at a banquet before the Virgin Queen took that fateful journey up Those Stairs. Let- tice conjures up for us the hundreds of pearls adorning the Sovereign's dress dredged up, each of them, from the depths of the Indian Ocean. We hear (eventually) how Sir John Fustian — that gallant yeoman — with one mighty bound leapt up the staircase, caught his precious Queen in his loyal arms, etc. etc. The tourists are in ecstasies.
So too is the audience, for this sort of rich comic exaggeration, terribly funny in itself, is exactly what this brilliant com- edienne excels at. Indeed you might say her acting career itself offers something of a parallel with the stages of baroque embellishment that characterise Lettice's commentary on Fustian House. Each time we see Miss Smith these days 'she seems to have hiked up her camp mannerisms yet another notch. Those who fail to find her funny complain about these excesses — the flapping wrists, the bird-like movements of her head and neck, that nasal, twanging voice. Personally I can take a great deal of Miss Smith's overacting. Who is there to match her in the comedy of manners? Who else can so perfectly express bewilderment and disdain at the same time?
There is a play here, behind Maggie Smith's performance. It is a good example of middle-brow, middle-class entertain- ment, the sort of play Peter Shaffer has always really been writing, although his more elevated topics in the past (Mozart, Aztec history) have tended to disguise the fact. It is also quintessentially English in its sense of character as Character. Lettice Douffet is out of step with her time. She is a fantasist who inhabits a world of well informed but highly coloured historical romance. Moments of high drama and style — the execution of Charles I or Mary Queen of Scots, for instance — these are the imaginative reaches she prefers to inhabit, and through which she spices up the dullness of the modern world. It makes her unemployable, of course. And how very English to find this whimsical, eccen- tric lady of a certain age — comfortably identifiable as an 'original' — living all this out in the sparse privacy of an Earl's Court basement flat.
Equally English is the discovery of an anarchic spirit slumbering in the tweed- clad civil servant's bosom of Lotte Schoen (Margaret Tyzack). Lotte is a failed architect, Lettice's one-time employer at the Preservation Trust, and now, unex- pectedly, her new friend. Lotte hates post-war modern architecture. Indeed she once took part in a botched attempt to blow up the Shell Building at Waterloo (this earns cheers from Southern Region commuters in the audience). In Lettice's exotic company Lotte discovers her old zest for urban terrorism. And, as the curtain falls, she and Lettice (reconciled after a small misunderstanding with an axe) are planning an assault on a selection of the most hated modern buildings in London; it is as. if the spirit of Just William had combined with the informed distaste of The Spectator's architecture correspon- dent.
Actually, the play wobbles perilously close to out-and-out sentimentality at the end, even though most of the evening is preserved from it by controlled whimsy and infectious charm. Nevertheless, it is an enjoyable night out at the theatre, and makes compulsively funny viewing.
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