Lawrence After Arabia
by
Howard Brenton
Arabian
Knight
It's now a few generations since David Lean, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif gave us Lawrence of Arabia. Now Howard Brenton nips in with Lawrence After Arabia before the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of a separate much older play by Terence Rattigan, Ross, which was jettisoned
after the movie went into production.
So
younger readers may have to be instructed on the background (see link),and glamour of T E Lawrence, almost a British Boys' Own equivalent of a sexless Rudolph Valentino sheik.
Indeed Lawrence is described so many times in Howard Brenton's new play as
"stepping back into the limelight", we wondered whether there should
have been an upper case "L" and if Charlie Chaplin was thinking of
producing a movie about him many years before the well-known desert epic!
Set
in the early 1920s in Bernard and
Charlotte Shaw's luxury Hertfordshire cottage, Lawrence After Arabia
covers the time T E Lawrence
enlisted under a false name in the RAF,
apparently trying to escape his fame (and the propaganda) as a derring-do
British hero who allied himself with the Arab cause against the failing Ottoman Empire.
We
have to confess a personal interest in this, as a relative married a Welsh Cambridge don who had also attended Jesus College, Oxford, was in the
intelligence corps as an Oriental studies expert at the same time as Lawrence
(and also knew his brother Arnold).
While
we're no experts and have only done the slightest of research some years ago,
it seems Lawrence was not as isolated and his company was much more diverse
than many would assume. But this play
isn't a close study of Lawrence.
It actually reminded us a little of Ronald Harewood's An English Tragedy, we've recently seen in an amateur production, although it would of course be misleading to identify Lawrence with the same politics. We should also say, as explained in Lawrence After Arabia, Lawrence turned down a knighthood (never let a fact get in the way of a good headline ;)!)
Curiously
while Jack Laskey makes a quietly indiosyncatic and charming Lawrence wracked with guilt at his part in colonial double dealing, the
Shaw household has the most punch in this play. The parallels
between the myth of a Shavian heroine, in a work then in progress, and
the hype surrounding Lawrence make for a convincing parallel as Shaw scholarship has uncovered.
It's
a pity then that an aphoristic Shaw (Jeff Rawle) and his secretary Blanche (Rosalind March)
are written as rather one note. Even if the suggestion does crop up that the image of Lawrence as portrayed in the play and other literature may itself be a figment of Shaw's socialist and anti-colonial imagination. This begs further questions about
Shaw and his cohorts' promotion of Lawrence, questions which remain unasked in
Lawrence After Arabia.
Shaw's wife, Charlotte, (Geraldine James), a wealthy woman and a powerhouse in her own right, is an
intriguing character who deserves exploration.
However she is given rather disappointingly reductionist
motives. Still, James
does well to convey sensitive intellect despite some rather clunky dialogue. And
hey ho, maybe Charlotte shares the fate of many a woman where biographers, at least in the past, have more of a stake in the male subject than those they rate as the supporting cast.
All
in all, this feels like the bare bones of something or a pulling together of
disparate elements focussing, for the moment, on Lawrence rather than a
development of the Lawrence story.
It's proficiently directed by John Dove and
all the actors acquit themselves well and don't bump into the furniture in
Shaw's study designed by Michael Taylor! ;) But the switch from the study to
the desert feels more like a slickly attractive school primer going over well-worn
ground than revelation. An amber light.
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