It’s theatre, but not as we know it
Michael Billington compares two plays written 64 years apart
IHAD a strange experience recently. One night, I went to see N. C. Hunter’s A Day by the Sea, written in 1953, revived at Southwark Playhouse. The next evening, I saw a new play, Victory Condition by Chris Thorpe, at the Royal Court. Admittedly the plays were written 64 years apart, but they seemed to belong to different universes.
Hunter’s play, although a bit creaky, had a narrative coherence and expressed a measure of hope; Mr Thorpe’s comprised two impenetrable monologues and offered nothing but doom, yet both are part of that indefinable thing we dub ‘theatre’.
Hunter’s story is fascinating. Born in 1908, he returned to playwriting after serving with the Royal Artillery in the Second World War and had a big West End hit in 1951 with Waters of the Moon starring Dame Edith Evans and Dame Sybil Thorndike. A Day by the Sea was also blessed with a lustrous cast—sir John Gielgud, Sir Ralph Richardson and Irene Worth—and A Touch of the Sun brought Sir Michael Redgrave and his daughter, Vanessa, onto the same stage. After that, Hunter was a victim of the Royal Court revolution of the 1950s and his plays were increasingly regarded as old-fashioned.
What is odd is that many of Hunter’s contemporaries— Sir Terence Rattigan, J. B. Priestley, Emlyn Williams and Rodney Ackland—have lately been rediscovered and it’s not easy to see why he’s remained in the shadows. He had the misfortune to be dubbed the ‘English Chekhov’ and it is true that you can sometimes see him aping the Russian master.
In A Day by the Sea, you have a group of upper-middleclass people in a Dorset country house who are dwelling on their unhappiness and talking of what life will be like in 500 years’ time. As the leading character, Julian Anson, is filled with emotional frustration and as there’s a plain governess secretly in love with a drunken doctor, it’s impossible not to think of Uncle Vanya. What Hunter missed was the dynamism that lay behind the lassitude of Chekhov’s characters.
There is still, however, much to savour. He catches the unease many people felt in the postwar world. We remember 1953 as the year of the Coronation, Everest, England winning the Ashes and Gordon Richards triumphing in the Derby, but Hunter also reminds us, through Anson, who works in the Foreign Office, that it was also an age of anxiety, especially in Europe.
This was the year in which the death of Stalin created uncertainty in Russia, Soviet tanks crushed an uprising in East Berlin and refugees fled an impoverished Hungary. How ever, the play, although deploring the indifference to world affairs of Anson’s mother, argues that one should never give way to hand-wringing despair.
Hunter’s play expressed a measure of hope; Mr Thorpe’s offered nothing but doom
This, for me, is the defining quality of the play: it suggests that, whatever life’s disappointments, human beings, like societies, have the capacity to change. Anson, elegantly played by John Sackville, starts as a poker-backed, work-obsessed diplomat. In the course of the weekend, he realises that he’s always loved the lately divorced Frances Farrar (a poised Alix Dunmore), but, even if he can never fulfil his romantic dreams, he buckles down to the tasks of country life with his mother, whom Susan Tracy invests with just the right mix of compassion and hauteur.
You could say that this is very much a West End play of the 1950s. It has a certain stiffness and too-obvious symbolism— the sea as a source of escape
and country gardens as a means of regeneration—but it has the virtues of its time: credible characters, a well-developed situation, a positive climax.
One of British theatre’s tragic errors in the 1950s lay in brutally discarding the older generation of playwrights, but the whirligig of time brings its revenges. Revivals of plays such as Rattigan’s The Deep Blue
Sea and Williams’s Accolade have shown there was much substance, as well as sexual daring, in the best work of Shaftesbury Avenue. Even if Hunter was a bit too Chekhovian for his own good, A Day by the Sea proves he had a gift for atmosphere.
The play’s virtues became even more apparent when I saw
Victory Condition. Playwriting has undergone radical changes over the past 65 years and I welcome today’s emphasis on compression: audiences absorb information more quickly and can be spared an excess of exposition.
In theory, there’s nothing wrong with building a play, as Mr Thorpe does, around monologues, but, here, the speeches spoken by characters called Man and Woman are intercut, so it’s difficult to follow the narrative thread. Man appears to be a military sniper and Woman a traumatised advertising worker, but quite what their speeches add up to remains a mystery.
I don’t wish to labour the point or automatically praise the old at the expense of the new. Mr Thorpe’s play is, here, courageously performed by Jonjo O’neill and Sharon Duncan-brewster.
What strikes me most, however, is not only the difference of tone and style between a play of 1953 and one of today, but the difference of outlook. Hunter, whatever his flaws, looks at people and society and assumes both can be improved; Mr Thorpe sees the world as heading for disaster and assumes, as far as I can make out, that we’re all doomed. Watching these two plays back to back, I felt nostalgic for the rational optimism of plays and days gone by.
‘A Day by the Sea’ runs until October 28 at Southwark Playhouse, SE1 (020–7407 0234); ‘Victory Condition’ is at the Royal Court, SW1, until October 21 (020–7565 5000)