Script glosses over everything Brownell brought to the literary table
It’s 1949 and George Orwell, 46 and racked by tuberculosis, is in the last months of his life, confined to a room in a London hospital. His novel
Nineteen Eighty-four has just been published and serious money is just beginning to roll in. He’s an impotent widower with a five-year-old son, haunted by nightmares that make him scream in the dark.
What could possibly persuade Sonia Brownell – a jaw-droppingly alluring literary editor and society darling 16 years his junior – to marry him?
It’s a fascinating corner of literary history and Brownell has been cast by biographers as an opportunistic gold digger. But after Orwell’s death, she fought to defend his legacy and ultimately made little money from it, dying all but destitute in 1980. It falls to Cressida Bonas, a former flame of Prince Harry, to tease out the complexity of this at once gilded and benighted literary femme fatale in a new play written by Tony Cox and directed by Jimmy Walters.
Bonas has the manslaying looks, ably abetted by a costume department that dresses her in immaculately cut tweeds, silk dresses and chinoiserie. She has also mastered the arts of playing a slightly bored, glacial, but perhaps secretly ravishingly hot, upper-crust English rose.
If Cox’s words had captured the playfulness and wit that Sonia must have had then this could be described as a performance of understated brilliance. But short of a few references to her going to dinner with Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, we’re rather at a loss as to what else Brownell brought to the literary table. She’s supposed to be the woman on whom the deliciously human and resourceful heroine, Julia, in Nineteen Eighty-four is based. The playwright gives Bonas, and us, nowhere near enough of this. Peter Hamilton Dyer coughs his way painfully through his portrayal of Orwell (who cackhandedly proposed to Brownell by asking if she could make dumplings). He captures the powerlessness of a once alpha-male now at bay: wild eyed and furious, as if every minute spent in aimless chat is a minute of hardwriting time wasted.
With the right script, there should be more to come from Bonas. But if the show has a virtue, it’s that it made me want to find out more than it has time to tell about Brownell and the painful final months of Orwell’s life.