The Roundabout
By JB Priestley
A Day In The Country
Watching
the rare revival of this 1931 play, a naughty thought crossed the mind of TLT.
What if JB Priestlley, Oscar Wilde (from beyond the grave), Bernard Shaw and Kaufman and Hart, the
latter probably by wire across the Atlantic, had got together and decided to
write a piece for the stage as if one playwright and as a game of consequences?
For
that's exactly what the plot and dialogue felt for us in this drawing room
comedy, written originally for actress Peggy Ashcroft during a short-lived love affair with Priestley. Ashcroft passed on it and a subsequent production was mounted
in Liverpool.
It's
a strange, uneven script, given a solid production directed
by Hugh Ross at Finsbury Park's Park Theatre, with an oddly mechanically zingy aphoristic feel, where the characters
are vastly stronger than the plot.
Aristocrat
and financier Lord Kettlewell (Brian Protheroe), although maintaining a
substantial country house household, is insolvent and trying to reduce costs by
discarding his mistress Hilda Lancicort (Carol Starks).
In the
midst of his travails, he is ambushed by the arrival of his long-lost daughter
Pamela (Bessie Carter), from whom, along with her mother Rose (Lisa Bowerman),
he has been estranged for many years.
Pamela
has arrived after a trip to the Soviet Union, bringing with her fellow
communist Staggles (Steven Blakeley) whose tough ideological stance disguises a
rather more illegitimate appreciation of capitalist wine and women.
An appreciation which oversteps the mark
when he presses his unwanted attentions on the pretty maidservant Alice (Annie Jackson), behaving more like a
licentious eighteenth century nobleman than then adherent of an austere cause bringing equality to the masses.
The frailest of plots has a set simply but effectively indicating a Tudor-style mansion
with overarching beams (designer:Polly Sullivan). But couched somewhere beneath
it all is an a subtext dwelling on shifts in power - from painting and theatre
to the mechanised medium of film, from silent movies to sound, the failure of
the Soviet ideal, international politics alongside economic woes.
All
entangled as Parsons the butler (Derek Hutchinson), who has his own run of good
luck cruelly snatched away, drunkenly observes, "in a shtate of gre-aet
social confusion".
Nevertheless
there's an oddly self conscious feel to the shifts as well in style and tone in
the writing. While jolie laide Pamela pushes the plot along, the mournfully
humorous leftover of imperial Edwardian Britain, down-at-heel idler Churton Saunders
(Hugo Sachs) is like a silent movie character with a clear view but bypassed by
events, but still tolerated on a small stipend on the studio lot.
Meantime
the inpecunious widowed Lady Knightsbridge (Richenda Carey) shows an imperiously
focussed saleswoman manner in drumming up business for her family with her own
take on political events: "Communists, eh? Is there any money in it,
because I'm looking for something for Agatha's younger girl - dreadfully plain,
poor thing!".
Maybe the
play was caught halfway between theatre and cinema and its own push between
agitprop and entertainment.
Comrade
Staggles, a character in Blakeley's performance still with a decidedly modern if caricatural
feel in our times, ostensibly talks about the bloated capitalist classes when
we know Lord Kettlewell is on his uppers.
But
Staggles could just as well to be talking about the fake life of luxury portrayed
on the big screen, "this rich, artificial sort of life, where you're eating
and drinking all day, and all the women are parading their sexual charms."
So, a bit
of a curio in the Priestley canon in a production which sometimes still has to
find its rhythm but with strong enough characterisations and performances to
carry it through to the upper ranges of an amber light.
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