Betjeman’s verse fails to sing onstage

Sand in the Sandwiches

The sound of church bells hollowing out the sky. The beeches mellow in the evening hush. The pubs thick with curling pipe smoke. So mightily do John Betjeman’s pungent, perfect paeans to England imagine an entire country into being that you wonder whether, had he not written them, England would have been an entirely different place.

Our best-loved Poet Laureate is reverentially honoured in Hugh Whitemore’s one-man play, starring the not very Betjeman-like Edward Fox. From a sun-dappled garden bench on Fotini Dimou’s simple, autumn leaf-strewn set, Betj wistfully and wittily looks back across his life. Play isn’t quite the right word: it’s more a stream-of-consciousness trawl through memory and verse as Fox, looking dapper in linen, reminisces on his years at Oxford, “church crawling” with WH Auden and a turbulent love life.

Poems – lots of them – are recited in full. There’s an early showing for one of Betjeman’s chilliest masterpieces, NW5 & N6 (Highgate at Eventide). Betjeman was a highly efficient journalist: he wrote more than 1,000 book reviews for The Daily Telegraph. His poetry, though, is the essence of nostalgia, both for his childhood, and for a vanishing England of evensong and strapping girls playing tennis.

I can see exactly why audiences might embrace this show. But oh, I’m sorry – I couldn’t love it. It’s a tall ask of any actor to deliver poems in the quantities Fox has to do here. His voice has the shape of a pendulum swing, slow and ponderously rhythmic, and it leaves many poems feeling flat.

Whitemore has bled anecdote into poem, but even for avowed Betjeman fans the effect can feel terribly monotonous. Gareth Armstrong’s lifeless staging doesn’t help much either. The evening did, however, send me scuttling back to Betjeman’s work. What a poet. And what an England.