Review The Autumn Garden

The Autumn Garden
by Lillian Hellman

Sweethearts and Scoundrels
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

On a trip to Alabama, TLT recalls a memorable tour of antebellum mansions on the Gulf Coast where a genteel Daughter of The American Revolution evoked times past. Including the institutionalised prostitution (which crossed the racial divide) of which the sons of the leading families partook, practically as an obligation, from an early age.

The Autumn Garden, first produced in 1951, deftly combines the secrets and scandals of life in the American Southern states, national and international politics and Hollywood in a deceptively languid piece by Alabama-born Lillian Hellman, also a former Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) script reader and a Hollywood screenwriter.

In fact, despite the recorded Chekovian inspiration and obvious similarity with fellow southerner Tennessee Williams, it struck us an American Terence Rattigan might be an apt comparison in Anthony Biggs' s production which, by the end, packs a definite punch.

Set in 1949, the owner of one of those Gulf Coast antebellum mansions which has seen better days, Constance (Hilary MacLean), has sold her family's New Orleans' town house on the death of her parents and attempts to resolve a debt-ridden estate.

She has been reduced to running the family's holiday home as a summer boarding house. with the help of black factotum Leon (Salim Sai), dependent on the family's circle of friends for guests.

Now she nervously awaits the return of an old beau, glib artist Nick Denery (Mark Healy)  with his wife Nina (Madalena Alberto), from Paris with their German maid (Leonie Schliesing) where he apparently spent the Second World War fairly comfortably under Nazi occupation.

Meanwhile, also staying as guests are a distinguished Boston-born member of the military, General Benjamin Briggs (Tom Mannion), who seems ready to embrace a new progressive order and is estranged from his ditzy movie-going southern belle wife Rose (Lucy Akhurst) and their two grown up sons.

Constance, at a time the European continent had become dependent on American Marshall Aid, has taken in her seemingly demure French niece Sophie (Madeleine Millar), daughter of her dead brother Sam and a French seamstress.

Sophie has come to a business like arrangement to marry young bachelor Frederic Ellis (Sam Coulson) who has literary aspirations and a substantial allowance from his grandmother (Susan Porrett), via his mother Carrie (Gretchen Egolf). Also on the guest register is hard-drinking banker Ned Crossman (Mark Aiken) whom Denery confuses with his brother Willy and whose love for Constance has now become a jaded memory.
       
The Autumn Garden is surpassed in fame by Hellman's two other plays Little Foxes in which former MGM star Elizabeth Taylor made her stage debut in 1981, and The Children's Hour.

Despite an effective set of faded glory designed by Gregor Donnelly, it struck us that maybe it was written as a movie, or even a soap for radio or that brash relative newcomer on the media scene, television. Still there is plenty of stagecraft, and the ensemble all give fluent and precise performances.

Once the second act gets underway, the previous hints about Hollywood politics and cover-ups become more explicit yet the Chekovian story of unrequited love and lives in the American South remains undimmed and stands on its own account.

Hellman herself was, to say the least, a divisive character. Once she, Showboat star Paul Robeson and Death of A Salesman playwright Arthur Miller were grouped together as radicals. She and lover Dashiell Hammett refused to name names to the House of UnAmerican Activities (unlike, for example, MGM actor Robert Taylor),  but she later irretrievably tainted her copybook.

In the public perception she remained a seemingly unreconstructed defender of Stalin, spouting falsehoods in a novel and movie she insisted was a partial factual memoir (even if Tom Stoppard, amongst others, has questioned the nature of literary memoirs in his recently revived Travesties), exposing herself in an undignified spat when she accused a fellow novelist of slandering her as "a liar" on a TV chat show and fell into the hands of lawyers just before her death.

Yet, as Biggs implies in the programme notes, whatever her mendacious literary and monetary manoeuvring, her reputation could well have suffered, with her skill as a writer downplayed, because she was a woman who played a man's game but was not tolerated as a man would be.

Just as Hellman's own reputation can be simple or complex, subject to the motivations of those portraying her, so The Autumn Garden is skilfully constructed, a simple tale of the South or a multifaceted piece. An amber/green light for a worthwhile  and careful revival.

Review The Fix

The Fix

Book and Lyrics by John Dempsey

Music by Dana P Rowe

American Pie

 http://www.uniontheatre.biz/

The Fix started life as a musical about presidential shenanigans produced by Cameron Macintosh and directed by Sam Mendes at the Donmar Warehouse in 1997. Currently it's opening the season at the Union Theatre,  which has now moved across the road from its former more ramshackle space under the railway arches in Southwark.

On the verge of the presidency, Reed Chandler, a family man with ambitious wife Violet and handsome, if ne'er do well, son Cal, suffers a setback. In the over-excitement  of a private Miss Whiplash encounter he literally has a heart stopping moment and dies.

His brother Grahame, a crippled Harvard-educated Machiavellian lawyer agrees with his sister in law Violet, a cross between Jackie O and Cruella De Vil, that the show must go on, with the star now Cal, plucked from playing air guitar in his bedroom, groomed for the Oval Office.

The story was apparently originally based on Robert Graves's novel "I, Claudius", itself already given various movie, theatre and TV adaptations, charting corruption and conspiracy in imperial Rome

It's  a lively if flawed piece matched by a production with the same qualities and faults directed by Michael Strassen. There are echoes of Pygmalion, Dorian Gray and  even a mention for Aristophanes' The Birds as well as a hefty Shakespearean dollop alongside the Roman decadence,

Fra Fee as the tousled haired Cal who goes from Marlon Brando white T shirt andjeans to suited and unexpectedly charismatic, if drug-addled, politician looks the part, even if his singing when tackling rock numbers such as One, Two, Three is slightly underpowered in the first act. However he proved sweet voiced and clear in the quieter numbers.

As the mafia honeytrap lover and small fry drug pusher, Tina McCoy, Madalena Alberto again looks the part and also, despite lacking diction in the first act while having the vocal strength, eventually comes into her own with both strong vocals and diction in the second act.

Peter Saul Blewden impresses as Reed Chandler, in a Hamlet's father-like ghostly return with the song Control to advise his son, by then a soldier,  amidst Middle East minefields.  He takes on with equal aplomb another part, the role of mafia don Anthony Gilardi.

Nonetheless the show belongs to Grahame, whose dark second act song First Came Mercy with its mix of religion and politics is a tour-de-force, and Violet with Ken Christiansen and Lucy Williamson respectively. 

Grahame on crutches, a Claudius stutterer, whom Christiansen invests with  an interesting mix of villainy and vulnerability, forms a partnership with Violet, the single-minded Jezebel, whose whole raison d' être centres on  making the men in her life the country's power players.

There is also a strong professional debut from Sam Barrett in the smaller role of the Presidetial bodyguard Peter.  

Despite being revised since its first production, it still feels very much a 1990s' piece. The to and fro between Grahame and Violet on the one hand and Cal on the other also throws into relief the problems of an unbalanced book

The introduction of I Claudius into a Kennedyesque late twentieth century political dynasty feels inconsistent and scattergun. The analogy between Cal and a manufactured rock star is truncated as, in the end, is Grahame's story. In fact it's Violet who has the best, most consistent dramatic arc with a satisfying finale to her story.

Sitting in the third row there was a sightline problem as the characters fell to their knees for some of the action. Some of the lyrics also became hard to hear as the characters retreated towards the back wall.

Nevertheless there is fine choral singing with an excellent bandn- keyboards, guitar, bass and drums - led by Josh Sood   

It's a solid start to  the Union Theatre's new venue with plenty to enjoy in an energetic show with a strong narrative drive even if the book feels somewhat forced. So we elect an amber light for this presidential piece.