Class that could do better
The Corn Is Green (Lyttelton Theatre, National Theatre)
Verdict: Minor drama ★★★✩✩
NICOLA WALKER’S admirers are legion, and I’m definitely one of them. The emotional intensity she brought to the lovelorn Ruth evershed in Spooks catapulted her to fame in unforgotten, Last Tango In halifax and The Split on Tv. And few can doubt the guts or gravitas she brings on stage.
But I’m not sure emlyn Williams’s 1938 autobiographical homage to his overbearing school teacher makes the best use of her talents.
The play originally starred Sybil Thorndike in the West end in 1938 and became a film starring Bette Davis in 1945.
here, Walker gives a commanding performance as bossy miss moffat in Dominic cooke’s revival. But she’s a rather stolid, matronly proposition who lacks the savoir faire of a miss Jean Brodie.
She marches into rural Wales on an educational blitzkrieg that might today be resisted as exhibiting a domineering english saviour complex.
Seeing off opposition from the local squire to start a school for ignorant miners, one coal-smeared youth catches her eye: young morgan evans, who she decides has the most brilliantly receptive mind. his character is the Williams self-portrait and miss moffat spends the next two years hot-housing evans for an oxford scholarship.
Despite her indifference to Welsh chapel and methodist evangelism, Walker’s nonconformist spinster is a hit with the local community.
her problem as a character, however, is not so much that she doesn’t raise a lot of sympathy, as that she’s barely challenged by anyone on stage.
She makes short work of Rufus Wright’s stuffed toff of a squire, dismissing him as ‘so stupid it sits on him like a halo’.
Poor obedient morgan (Iwan Davies) seems unable to stop her turning him into a glove puppet. vaguely resistant at first, he is a doormat who barely gets a word in edgeways — even with Saffron coomber as the teenage temptress who leads him astray. The only character of substance is the housekeeper and mother of the temptress (Jo McInnes), who raises a laugh of astonishment when she says of her daughter: ‘I disliked her the first time I saw her.’
To bulk up the lightweight plot, cooke’s production has an actor (Gareth David-Lloyd) as the author — speaking directions and cueing actors.
The novelty of that, and soundeffects of creaking doors and rattling crockery instead of scenery, soon wears off; I have seldom been more grateful to lay eyes on a bench and blackboard. Thankfully, more scenery steadily accretes until we have a sunny room with bay window in the second half.
A chorus of Welsh miners forming a male voice choir is also indisputably seductive, lending a warmth and nostalgia that’s otherwise missing. I longed for a round of Land of my Fathers as a good tearful climax, but that never comes.
Instead, the slightly weird finale has the author seemingly falling in love with his student self as they waltz intimately about the stage. But that didn’t stop the matinee audience directing a standing ovation at Walker.
This, I suspect, was more in approval of her character’s ofsted-like zeal, than in admiration of miss moffat’s fortitude in overcoming a few trifles.