Unmoved by Lawrence in suburbia
Hampstead Theatre
BECAUSE OF our straight lines we will bring chaos and reap a whirlwind,” declares T. E. Lawrence — aka Lawrence of Arabia. According to Howard Brenton’s new play, which is never less than interesting — but also never more than interesting — the lines drawn from Lawrence’s early 20th-century adventure reach right up to today’s Middle East conflicts.
The carving up of the region’s Arab lands by the British and French empires, “like a fat turkey at some mad Christmas dinner”, may still lead to our own destruction, declares Jack Laskey’s sinewy and tormented Lawrence. Commissioned by Hampstead Theatre to mark the centenary of the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Empire, this play is unexpectedly anchored not in the Arabian desert, but in the shady drawing room of George Bernard Shaw’s Hertfordshire house in 1922, when Lawrence’s celebrity as the superhero of his day was at its height.
Haunted by shame over Britain’s betrayal of the Arabs he fought with — they were denied their freedom even though the Brits would not have beaten the Turks without them — Lawrence has here enlisted into the lower ranks of the RAF and takes refuge at the house of his old friends Charlotte Shaw, née Payne-Townshend (played by Geraldine James), and husband George (Jeff Rawle).
From here, Lawrence’s exploits are seen in flashback. Michael Taylor’s rather two-dimensional set of the Shaws’ drawing room recedes to reveal enough nothingness — floor boards recede to a distant horizon — to represent a desert.
Here, Lawrence falls in with Prince Faisal (Khalid Laith), the figurehead of the Arab uprising, and then falls out with him after Faisal sees Lawrence for what he is — a British agent. Then we’re back to the present in 1922 Herts where Charlotte is editing Lawrence’s memoirs, between the lines of which she and Shaw’s assistant Blanche Patch — a delightfully acerbic Rosalind March — detect that Lawrence is gay and an S&M addict to boot.
By the end of John Dove’s overly static production you certainly feel that the shimmering figure immortalised on film by Peter Sinewy: Jack Laskey O’Toole has been demystified. But what remains a mystery is the British attitude towards Arabs. And to the extent to which Brenton tackles this phenomenon the play is saddled by a nagging flaw. Its central argument, and explanation for today’s conflicts, is that Arabs are the victims of the racist and imperial British who not only betrayed them but viewed them as incapable “towel-heads”, as Lawrence puts it. And worse, this crime was set in stone and sand by ignorant cartographers in the form of those straight lines. Much of this narrative is undoubtedly true (even if it is sometimes hijacked to delegitimise the straight lines of Israel.) But, to con- clude, as Brenton seems to, that the West and especially Britain is singularly responsible for today’s Middle East conflicts is surely to fall into the same traps and tropes as the imperial Brits. It’s a view that denies Arabs any responsibility, which, if I were an Arab (unfortunately my Beirut-born grandmother doesn’t qualify me), I think I’d find a bit insulting.
If anything, Faisal comes across here as the kind of incapable, illdisciplined murderer in victory that bolsters the racist views of the British high command, personified by a suitably imperious William Chubb as Field Marshall Edmund Allenby, Lawrence’s commanding officer.
As a portrait of a figure shrouded in myth, the play works well. But any attempt to explain the present by portraying the past needs an altogether more complex approach.
Which is probably why the result is no more interesting than, well, interesting.