Review Sand In The Sandwiches

Francis Beckett admires both the subject of the one-man play and the actor playing him but feels the two are not a perfect match.

Sand in the Sandwiches
by Hugh Whitemore  

Betjemanland
http://www.trh.co.uk/

I so wanted to love Sand in the Sandwiches.

John Betjeman’s a guilty pleasure for me. A left wing chap of a certain age doesn’t like to admit that he’d rather have Betjeman than fellow poets Auden or Spender any day, but I would.

I admire Edward Fox, whose long acting career has provided us with many memorable performances, and who is now admirably sustaining a one-man performance as Betjeman in the vast Theatre Royal Haymarket at the age of 80.

The mix in this play about Betjeman’s life and work as he approached his fiftieth birthday,  was about right, with some qualifications.  It is a judicious mixture of old favourites – the show starts, as is only right and proper, with one of his best known poems Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn – and some less well-known works, together with lengthy extracts from Betjeman’s verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, plus some extra biographical information.

Into the mix, writer Hugh Whitemore has chucked a few funny stories with a pretty flimsy connection to Betjeman, such as what Winston Churchill said when he saw a picture of the woman Labour politician Tom Driberg was to marry: “Well, buggers can’t be choosers.”

So what’s the problem?  The problem is that Edward Fox doesn’t convince as Betjeman. It’s not just that he’s quite unlike Betjeman physically – though he is.  It’s that he is like Edward Fox - tall, elegant, handsome, slightly raddled Edward Fox, with a lovely voice and distinguished longeurs.

When he ends a love poem on a note of despair – “Little, alas, to you I mean/ For I am old and bald and green” it makes complete sense coming from the portly, untidy Betjeman, but none at all coming from neatly elegant Fox. 

When he describes his schooldays, you can see that the boy in the poem – unsporty and aesthetic – grew up to be John Betjeman.  The boy who might have grown up to be Edward Fox is Betjeman’s nemesis, not mentioned in this show:

“Percival Mandeville, the perfect boy
“Was all a schoolmaster could wish to see –
“Upright and honourable, good at games,
“Well build, blue eyed; a sense of leadership
“Lifted him head and shoulders from the crowd.”

So it is, to some extent, with the selection of Betjeman’s poetry offered here. We learn from the play that Betjeman had a patrician distaste for post Second World War state planning – as he did.  We do not learn that Betjeman disliked Thatcherite capitalism even more:

“You ask me what it is I do. Well, actually, you know,
“I’m partly a liaison man and partly PRO.
“Essentially I integrate the current export drive
“And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five.”

A lifetime ago, when I was a sixth former, I found in the local library a recording of Betjeman reading Summoned by Bells.

Some poets do their own work no favours when they read them – think of that ancient scratchy recording of Hilaire Belloc massacring Tarantella – but Betjeman read his poetry wonderfully, and made Summoned by Bells an extension of his rather quirky, if sometimes disingenous, personality.

Hearing Edward Fox recite it beautifully, I yearned to hear Betjeman recite it less beautifully. Still, Fox does recite beautifully.

Director Gareth Armstrong moves him about the stage enough to make it interesting, and not so much as to make it distracting, and Fotini Dimou’s simple set is just what it should be – a moody backdrop which knows its place and doesn’t try to take over.

It’s not as good as the real thing, but it’s an enjoyable evening in the theatre, well worth an amber/green light.

Review A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

Francis Beckett bathes in the nostalgia and delusion of a late Tennessee Williams' play set in America's deep south and is equally beguiled by the historic Coronet Theatre. 

A Lovely Sunday For Creve Coeur

by Tennessee Williams

Beer And Skittishness

http://www.the-print-room.org/

The Print Room at The Coronet is one of those places which tell you that there is still hope for London. Even  without the full refurbishment it deserves, it is magnificent. 

Arriving for a performance of the 1970s' Tennessee Williams' play A Lovely Sunday At Creve Coeur,  I started in the bar, standing with producer Veronica Humphris on a fiercely sloping floor surrounded by walls in a deep shade of red, huge and ornate doors, and eccentric wall hangings. 

She told me about plans to restore it to its former glory, if the money can be found. The theatre had a  distinguished early career after its opening in 1898, graced by the likes of Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt.

It became a cinema in 1923, then narrowly escaped closure and conversion into a McDonaldshamburger joint  An energetic campaign saved it for theatre and, while it now has smaller scale performance spaces run by a charity, it's still a wonderful temporary compromise.

At this performance the great red columns of the original theatre merge seamlessly into the red walls of a beautiful and meticulous set (designer: Fotini Dimou.) for the one-act drama set in Missouri directed by Michael Oakley.

We are in a small apartment in 1930s' St Louis, shared by the lovely Dorothea, who is desperate for a husband, and the frumpy Bodey, who has given up hopes of a husband and is desperate for nephews and nieces.

Dorothea is a fragile Southern Belle, not unlike Tennessee Williams’s more famous Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, is in love with a man whom we are sure (correctly) from the start will turn out to be a scoundrel . 

She exercises furiously in an effort to maintain her allure. On her the evening turns, and she is brought to magnificent and entirely believable life by Laura Rogers, who will be the fittest woman in London by the end of the run.

Debbie Chazen as Bodey offers exactly the right mix of resignation and disappointment, hope and kindness. Hermione Gulliford is excellent as the scheming, manipulative Helena, who threatens to disrupt their lives, and there is a nice cameo of demented neighbour, Miss Gluck, from Julia Watson.

Yet the character who came to life most strongly for me was a character we never meet, Bodey’s brother Buddy. Bodey and Buddy are of German ancestry. Both are overweight, but Buddy encourages his expanding girth with plentiful daily supplies of beer and bratwurst, while he indulges a cigar smoking habit.   

He appears to be a solid citizen, not just physically, and, encouraged by his sister, he has set his sights on getting Dorothea to share his life. Having reduced  his daily beer intake, he vows to cut it down even further.    

But one suspects that this is more his sister’s project than Buddy’s own, and it is her dreams of nephews and nieces she can nurture which will really be shattered if it does not come off.  At the end, it looks as though it might come off, and the author seems rather to approve of this outcome; I beg to disagree with the author.

The play is a little predictable, but we quickly learn to care about what happens to Dorothea and Bodey.  It does not offer the emotional charge of Tennessee Wiliams’s more famous work, but it has a charm and humour which they lack.  It’s a good evening in the theatre; a green light from me.