Bittersweet attempt to capture Waugh’s anthem to lost youth
Theatre
Brideshead Revisited
York Theatre Royal
Evelyn Waugh’s classic novel holds an inescapable grip on our imaginations: it was famously adapted by ITV in a version starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews and, less successfully, adapted for the big screen in 2008.
It may feature a cast of characters whose gilded, monied lifestyles feel these days like the stuff of myth but the key to its enduring appeal lies, of course, in its title: everyone has known that sweet, exquisite pain of nostalgia and the impossibility of recapturing what one has lost, however hard one looks. Yet this very quality is an elusive beast to capture on stage and for all the merits of Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Waugh’s heavily scented hymn to vanished youth, in this new English Touring Theatre co-production the novel’s ineffable poetry remains tantalisingly just out of reach.
Damian Cruden’s production makes much of the book as a series of memories, with Charles Ryder directly recounting to the audience his long relationship with the glittering, almost unfathomably wealthy Marchmain family, beginning with his very first encounter with the “epicene” Sebastian Flyte as he projectile vomits through his college room window during his first term in Oxford. Those first giddy, wine-soaked weeks and months that follow are beautifully conveyed, thanks in no small part to the dynamic between Brian Ferguson’s Charles, all stiff upper lip and buttoned up heart, and Christopher Simpson’s combustible Sebastian, a dangerous mix of puppyish charm and volcanic petulance. The homosexual nature of their relationship, such a delicately ambiguous thread within the novel, is here regrettably made explicit but Simpson brutally suggests the callousness with which Sebastian taunts Charles over his helpless love for him: there is a savage mockery about his Sebastian that only deepens the more dissolute he becomes. It is a pity Simpson is only on stage for the show’s first half: the production is a duller place when he isn’t in it.
Cruden, perhaps wisely, doesn’t try to visually depict the novel’s many rich settings. Rather a series of sliding panels and an abstract use of colour and light variously convey the dappled waters and stained glass windows of Venice, the long windows of an Oxford college, the elegance of an English country house, the seedy heat of a Moroccan drinking den. Yet if Sara Parks’s suggestive set design cleverly resembles the luscious ebb and flow of Waugh’s prose, Lavery’s text conversely often feels like a series of dramatic bullet points – perhaps an inevitable consequence of condensing a 300-page novel into a two-and-a-halfhour stage show. One could wish, too, for a stronger presence from the two main female characters, Julia and Lady Marchmain, neither of whom quite exert the power they ought. Yet if the sort of characters Waugh was writing about have these days fallen deeply out of fashion, this adaptation is a powerful reminder that faith and money are no protection against the terrors of disillusionment.
‘For all its merits, the novel’s ineffable poetry remains just out of reach’
At York Theatre Royal until Sat, then touring. Details: ett.org.uk