Review The Winslow Boy

The Winslow Boy
 By Terence Rattigan
The Old Vic, SE1

Is Right Ever Really Done? -  Rattigan's Tangled Web

It was generally thought to be very strange that a notoriously insincere farceur could so readily turn his hand to matters of fairly serious theatrical moment ..."  The playwright quoted in Terence Rattigan by Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson.

TLT and her shiny metal aide de camp went to an early Old Vic preview of Rattigan's evergreen 1946 The Winslow Boy, the five-shilling-stolen-postal-order drama. However, at the time we desisted from writing a review of a rather plodding production with the best performances coming from Henry Goodman as pa (Arthur) Winslow, Deborah Findlay as ma (Grace) Winslow and Nick Hendrix as the alleged culprit's brother, Dickie.

What is seemed to miss was the febrile pace of the early years of the twentieth century with Britain on the cusp of introducing universal social insurance, changing subjects to citizens. Also the atmosphere of 1946, with Churchill and the Conservatives defeated, ushering in a new government and a welfare state dependent on American loans.

So this is a rather different review and, hopefully, a thoughtful piece, giving some context to a fine play. Bear with us as we start the engine, build up speed and rev into action! :)

Just to nudge you along the highway, the original old age pension, introduced in the significant year of 1908, paid tellingly mostly to elderly single women, via local post offices was, guess what - five shillings.

The Winslow Boy was inspired by a true-life 1908 post office scandal, which went global, of 14-year-old Royal Naval cadet George Archer-Shee, renamed in the play Ronnie Winslow (acted by Charlie Rowe this time at the Old Vic). Rattigan moved to 1912, after the resolution of the real case in 1911, which was also the year of the first National Insurance Act and Rattigan's birth.

It seems the authorities at the Royal Naval College, Osborne pretended that cadets' parents did not exist but allowed postal orders to be sent direct to cadets rather than to the College and then paid out.

Despite one cadet alleging theft against George Archer-Shee (or whatever else was going on amongst the male cadets), the case did not involve the police and police courts. It was left as an internal affair with the verdict of the internal enquiry protected by Crown immunity.

Perhaps it's worth noting that the character of barrister Sir Robert Morton was based on Sir Edward Carson who represented the Marquess of Queensbury, cross-examining Oscar Wilde at the notorious "somdomite" libel trial. 

In The Winslow Boy, with the help of journalists competing for a human interest story and women readers, the silk Sir Robert Morton (Peter Sullivan, played at the 1946 première by Emlyn Williams, writer of Accolade) proves adept at disguising that Ronnie and family de facto citizens under social insurance, not subjects under the Crown.

Instead he promotes the role of the Crown, petition of right, the play-acting of civil courts with their legal advertisements and presents and Her Majesty's Parliament, already rendered obsolete before the Crown Proceedings 1947 legislation, catching citizens in its Kafkaesque Crown and court web from a bygone age of subjects.

In this context, "Let Right Be Done!", far from a sincere plea for civil liberty, becomes a much more slyly ambiguous expression of deceptive right-wing politics, glib soundbite, "costs" for legal theatricals and the manipulation of a vulnerable family and a gullible newspaper-reading public.

Anyway, in our view, the character of barrister Sir Robert is a Janus-faced chancer of a politician, putting the family unnecessarily through the emotional and, more importantly, financial wringer (pocketing fees and helping legal chums pocket the court costs), manipulating public opinion with contract law rendered a sham by the introduction of social insurance.

In fact, he fulfils the bitter words about him early in the play, voiced by Ronnie's rather Left-wing suffragette sister Catherine (Naomi Frederick), herself a single woman who, by the end of the play, may well be destined for a spinster old-age-five-shilling pension, directly as a result of her family pursuing the case. Unless she, as one of an elite few and token female presence, joins with a "charming hat" the archaic Parliamentary club, as hinted in the play, and either is left in ignorance of or does not let on about the pretence.

This may seem pedantic and over-complicated beside a simpler, more appealing melodramatic court room triumph and almost-love story Rattigan dedicated, "in the hope that he may live to see a world in which this tale will point no moral", to future Tory MP Paul Channon, son of his friend, American-born Henry "Chips" Channon.

However, that loses the sheer Morton-like cunning artfulness, drive and political nous implicit in the writing's sly subtext in the year of armed forces returning hoping for a brave new world and Churchill's speech on an iron curtain descending in Europe.

In 1908 (or 1912) Britain losing its Empire had more ready cash in the all-too-tempting state pension pot at local post offices and the accumulated small savings of citizens, than in failing commercial banks. Citizens' small savings came from wages paid daily or weekly in money, cash - unlike the debts of tottering credit-driven banks, solely with commercial clients, at the mercy of Britain's fading imperial power, US loans and market crashes. Surely, not so distant from current day news images of Cypriots demonstrating with the placards "Hands off our Provident Funds"?

Interesting also to discover that true-life Archer-Shee father did not work for "Westminster Bank" as in the play (nonetheless, a real bank now part of Royal Bank of Scotland) but as an agent in Bristol of The Bank of England.

Meanwhile, The Winslow Boy's real (half) brother, Major Martin Archer-Shee, was a Conservative MP in the Palace of Westminster.

With the Bank of England acting at the time as the Receiver for insolvencies and the real Royal Naval College, Osborne, closing down eventually in the 1920s, it gives added pith to father Arthur Winslow's telephone call to the College after his son's "sacking". He questions the General Post Office (GPO) telephone operator: "Replace the receiver?". It may again be worth noting 1912 was the year when most of the private telephone companies in the UK were nationalised.

If you're still unconvinced, remember the refusal of the headmaster in Rattigan's next play, The Browning Version, of 1948 to pay out of the public school pension pot for the "Himmler of the Lower Fifth", Crocker-Harris the Classics Master.*

In TLT's opinion, much of The Winslow Boy's genius comes from the knitting together and bridging of many 20th-century themes alongside the stolen postal order story, even possibly up to atomic bomb corporation DuPont Chemicals, transformed with acid wit into "Madame Dupont", French dressmaker to the Winslow femmes.

And the play also reflects accurately the sorry clash of modern corporate state with archaic insolvent institutions, in real life still conning citizens with national insurance numbers that they were the middle-class version of Oliver-Twist-orphan/cadet workhouse subjects with no rights.

Surely no coincidence that maid Violet (Wendy Nottingham in the current production), brought up in an orphanage, evolves through the play into a modern woman? She becomes more and more assured in dealing with both media and tradesmen. Like the small savings of Post Office account holders and the state pension funds of elderly women, she assumes an increasingly important role.

For TLT, this remains a beautifully-crafted, mid-20th century play shaped by its characters, a true story and the increasingly desperate strategies of post-war Tory politicians to veer public opinion their way. There are some good performances but energy and vitality are sapped in this unfocussed production.

See the Financial Times, WhatsonStage and The Observer critics to back up this view. The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and the London Evening Standard critics reserve the right to differ, while blogger Head of Legal seems to play off both sides: Just about an amber light from this reviewer.

By the way, the real-life naval cadet pawn in all this, George Archer-Shee, was killed aged 19, after enlisting as a first lieutenant in the army on his return from a Wall Street job,  in the First World War. So, legal farce turned to tragedy and he never lived to collect his five-shilling-old-age-pension (seven shillings and six old pence for couples if he had married) - unlike his lawyer ...

* Furthermore, the story of George Archer-Shee and the postal order was first mooted as a propaganda movie advertising English democracy. Even so, it was inspired by an American piece on the case by critic Alexander Woolcott, brought to Rattigan, the grandson of a high-ranking colonial judge and MP, by actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Filmmakers rejected it as too "dull" for a movie, Rattigan stuck by it and the rest is history.

30th March 2013 UPDATE:  "Crown Post Office Workers Strike Over Franchise Plans' BBC  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-21974862

25th April 2013 JUST ANOTHER NOTE The beauty of the internet is that when events (as in the apocryphal quote of Macmillan) come along, TLT can add them for posterity or, at least, one hopes, the British Library archive. So, without wanting to diminish the tragic impact of conflict on families, the irony of this story about two First World War soldiers finally laid to rest turning out to be insurance company employees proved irresistible ...

Review Facts

Facts

by Arthur Milner

Finborough Theatre, SW10

Scripting the Cops

After disappearing off the celebrity scene, it takes guts to reappear, as Kerry Katona or Frank Sinatra can testify. ;) But TLT and her somewhat dusty steed (horsepower rather than horse meat!) decided to make a comeback for this intriguing Canadian play. A Jewish-Israeli (Michael Feast) and a Palestinian detective (Philip Arditti) meet in a tiled Israeli military unit, the latter arriving after negotiating checkpoints, to investigate an American archeologist’s murder on the West Bank. Outside their usual local comfort zones, the archeologist's nationality forces them to take national and world opinion into account. Growing above the Palestinian and Israeli impasse, in fact (geddit?!), the play turns into a much more tricksy and close-to-the-bone dissection of policing worldwide and military-dominated land. That is: the use (and abuse) of technology and a police mindset  rooted in literary and screenwriting stereotypes, software multiple choice, competing academic hypotheses and, yes, nationalistic ideology. Everything, save evidence-based investigations. In short, amid this all, what are the facts? Was this clear from the preview performance at The Finborough directed by Caitlin McLeod? One has to say, 'Only sporadically'. Maybe the fault lies in the  script, maybe in an uncertain production, or perhaps a bit of both. Eventually the Jewish militant settler suspect, a property manager and nimble offspring of a lawyer, joins the detectives for interrogation in a canny performance by Paul Rattray. However, it takes a very attuned ear to catch the hints undermining the stereotypes put forward - and they are just faint hints planted amid the red herrings in this piece. It could be this play, despite, or indeed because of, its arguments, needs a more Pinteresque approach to allow the audience to assimilate the ironies underlying the oft trundled-out and well-rehearsed formulas about crime scenarios and Israel/Palestine. Consideration rather than choler.  This discussion of policing and technology should seem vital in a week which has spotlighted local level South African police abuse, often hidden when not filmed, and British children turned into stock computer program figures within school report software for administrative convienience. Instead, if TLT has interpreted correctly why the play may seem schematic, the myths and formulas, instead of counterpointing, are allowed to outweigh the meaning. Of course TLT and friend may have got this totally wrong - something you're unlikely to hear any police officer admit nowadays unless instructed by a professional liability insurance company lawyer or an approved police software program ;) An amber light for a production tackling important issues which may still have the potential to become a must-see if it finds its feet during the run.

Review Mack and Mabel

Mack and Mabel
Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman, Book by Michael Stewart

Based on an idea by Lionel Spigelglass, Revised by Francine Pascal
Southwark Playhouse SE1

More Than Bagels and Knishes

With a ravishing 1974 score by Jerry  Herman, musical Mack and Mabel, a saga of silent movies, stardom, drugs and a doomed love affair should be a stonking success. Knowing the wonderful songs beforehand, TLT and her firing-on-all-cylinders sidekick were inclined to be kindly disposed and doubt the criticism of the late Michael Stewart's book as some sort of 1970s’ theatrical politicking.  Any musical with the song “Look What Happened to Mabel”, where lyrics impeccably rhyme “ambitious” and “knishes” and still manage to convey touchingly the revolutionary impact of movie technology on people’s lives,  must have something going for it.  Well, your dynamic theatregoing duo came out humming the tunes and admiring the intermittent dance routines but understanding,  through experience, what the critics meant. As silent movie pioneer, Mack Sennett, Norman Bowman is a tad young for the role but has the charismatic brooding look, bone structure and power in his voice to take on the classic Herman bitter-sweet hymns to life, love and the movie industry. Flame-haired Laura Pitt-Pulford's singing performance also reaches powerful heights as deli delivery girl turned Sennett star and lover Mabel Normand. Classy performances emerge too from Jessica Martin as tough-talking Lottie Ames and Stuart Matthew Price as quietly efficient and tactful up-and-coming director Frank Capra.  The problem is the way the main characters of Sennett and his star Mabel Normand are written rather than the performances. The personalities dissolve as the show progresses, pulling any number of ways with no exact trajectory and fudging the melodrama. Maybe in the 1970s, an early twentieth-century tale ending in drugs and eventual death,  with lunatic antics, vagaries of film finance, drug dealing, hints of abortions, gangland hits and something darker underlying even the zany Keystone cops were just too close to home to write about in an uncensored fluent fashion.  In contrast, Fred Ebb's and Bob Fosse's satiric book for Chicago achieves an upbeat, if perverse, slick American Dream ending. Despite revisions by Stewart’s sister Francine Pascal, Herman’s soaring musical peaks can’t hide the dips into anti-climactic dialogue, hurried transitions and narrative clumsiness. Yet, it’s worth keeping the faith for the songs, set numbers, the ragged, atmospheric true-life tragedy and the sisyphean task just about overcome by a talented, hard-working  cast and team, including director Thom Southerland and choreographer Lee Proud. So, still totally worth seeing and an amber light.

Democracy Review

Democracy

by Michael Frayn

The Old Vic SE1       

It’s Complicated 

TLT and her motorised assistant made their way to the white pillars of the German Chancellery, sorry, The Old Vic, for a  performance of Michael Frayn’s 2003 spy drama  Democracy. In a time of coalition and European nations yoked uneasily together, this proved to be an intriguing, if uneven, evening. Democracy is based on a real-life 1970s’ scandal when the knife-edge task of keeping political parties, straining-at-the-leash diverse Western German states and an East German Communist neighbour on side falls on the enigmatic figure of Chancellor Willi Brandt played with wry downbeat charm by Patrick Drury.  Meanwhile by his side is the scuttling, loyal assistant Guenter Guillaume (Aidan McArdle looking for all the world like a stocky Groucho Marx who really was of German descent!), eventually exposed as a Stasi plant. From the Lilian Baylis seats (the Upper Circle) the dry complex wit of the dialogue was sometimes a little lost in the first act. Perhaps the play’s poetic pace and rhythms are more suited to an intimate stage, despite the striking evocation of  governmental conference rooms, corridors and the over-the-border spy control room.  As a blogger, TLT doesn’t have to play the lofty critic and it’s worth eavesdropping audience reaction. Some were totally engrossed in the deadpan evocation of 1970s' politics, personalities and geography. Others were noticeably less enchanted: “A history lesson” and “lack of women” were two comments.  It’s the second act where the ruthless all-male politicking, symbiotic spy network, personal dilemmas and, most of all, the mystery of human behaviour at the heart of this play, come into their own . So mixed feelings reflected in a verdict of an amber with some flashes of green light.

Events While Guarding The Bofors Gun Review

Events While Guarding The Bofors Gun
by John McGrath
Finborough Theatre, SW10

A Busy Day At The Barracks

Time to take the dust sheet off TLT’s sidekick to trundle once more to the Finborough Theatre for a play with a documentary-sounding title about British soldiers in the 1950s' German Rhineland as part of the Allied occupation.  Or maybe the title has the dispassionate power of All Quiet on The Western Front. For this proved to be a thrilling evening with a 1966 play rightly dusted down and given a sterling production directed by Robert Hastie with a uniformly strong cast matched by clever, under-stated but resonant design, lighting, sound effects and staging. Inspired by the writer’s own bout of National Service, it somehow manages to combine seamlessly a cross section of characters familiar from many a wartime film with a grittiness, rawness, plus a leavening humour, borne from real-life experience, and a state-of-the-nation play: A sort of Journey’s End for post-imperial conscription Britain. John McGrath has now entered into TLT and her metallic steed's top of the pops top ten as a writer of plays to see and it's an unequivocal green light which needs no defending for this must-see watch on the Rhine.      

The Kitchen Review

The Kitchen

by Arnold Wesker

National Theatre, SE1

And Who's Going To Do The Washing Up?

"Talk to him, he's your generation!"  This memorable line rings out as one despairing kitchen worker tries to lessen the disruption to a large post-second-world-war cosmopolitan  restaurant. Indeed this seems a production for a generation brought up on credit-boom TV cookery programmes, where promoting sleek, clean kitchens went hand in hand with enticing folks into sub-prime mortgages.  It's a magnificent set and a production interpreting the kitchen as an enormous circus ring, where the first act ends with a literal high wire act. However, in TLT's opinion, this misses the point of this fine 1957 play - a gritty behind-the-scenes view of a working establishment where the performance is for the customers in the dining room, not in the kitchen.  Such an interpretation with moments frozen in time and balletic choreography disrupts the play's rhythm which should reflect the lulls and crescendos of  the working routine. Instead the kitchen is likened to a continuous dream-like circus performance with stylistic differences between the televisual realism of the first act short scenes and the tragedy of the second blunted. No wonder our neighbour found it confusing: It is hard work trying to find meaning in a metaphorical interpretation instead of the story!  At the same time, there are some great turns from the thirty odd ensemble cast - Ian Burfield as the ungainly beer-swigging bigot of a butcher Max sticks in the mind, Paul McCleary as the head chef who disclaims all responsibility, as well as  Bruce Myers' exotically-named, if not accented, boss Mr Marango,  and the actors sweep around the large stage effectively. But with all the distractions, some of the dialogue was lost for the audience in the circle, along with  the links between the first and second act, and therefore the story arc. At the same time, it made us realize how influential Arnold Wesker, a former pastry chef who knew what he was talking about, has been as a playwright on later plays like Trevor Griffith's Comedians and even Harold Pinter's The Caretaker.  All in all, an intriguing experiment and an amber light. And perhaps a play that could make a terrific movie (it's already been a musical in Japan!)?

A Woman Killed By Kindness Review

A Woman Killed By Kindness

by Thomas Heywood

National Theatre, SE1

A Play Of Two Halves

Apparently, according to those in the know, director Katie Mitchell is an auteur who polarizes audiences and critics. Well, TLT does remember, before the start of her bloggery, sitting through the sheer unadulterated boredom of Her Naked Skin directed by the aforesaid Ms Mitchell. In fact, TLT already feels  like she’s revved up her pompous fuddy-duddy-Muppet-grumpy-old-man-like-side using the epithet “Ms" Mitchell for this production of 1603 play A Woman Killed By Kindness by Thomas Heywood. Except that, quite unexpectedly, TLT enjoyed it.  TLT and her side-kick have little idea whether what they saw reflects the original play – but hey, Mr Heywood’s been published – it’s not like there can be an unresolved squabble in the audience’s mind as to what is the writer and what is the director (even though a “text editor” Lucy Kirkwood was involved).  Anyway, it's a tale of two households played out on a split stage, one aristocratic and one middle-class, one with an adulterous wife and the other a sister more or less sold to a creditor. While some have noted an updating to 1919 brings it  into the time of Downton Abbey, it is, in TLT’s opinion,  a critique of bodice-ripping modern cinematic or television portrayals of such eras.  This makes it a very cool, but  nevertheless always gripping production with the implications of debt and money lending adding a certain relevant frisson. A couple of missteps – the entry of one of the women with a suicidal rope round her neck seemed crude and unwarranted; the final line sent TLT scurrying to the NT bookshop to look it up and find her disquiet  about its attribution in the on-stage version was well-founded. However,  these two  quibbles apart,  “out of tune, out of time” is in the text and with wonderful parallel staging, design and always engrossing acting, it worked for TLT, who with her side-kick, awards this production a coveted green light!

Anne Boleyn Review

Anne Boleyn

by Howard Brenton

Shakespeare’s Globe SE1 

The Courtly Lives of Others 

On Newsnight the other day a former Labour minister regaled us with the theory that the ‘welfare state’ should become the ‘protection state’. Well, this play by Howard Brenton, ostensibly chronicling the life of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII,  gives us rather sex and money in the 16^th and 17^th  protection racket state.  Despite its eponymous title, TLT and her stalwart motorised steed felt there were times in the uniformly well-acted first half where the role of Anne in the play seemed like an afterthought tacked on, diluting a much more male and, dare TLT say it, interesting play on the court, religion and politics. The collage feel of the first act, which structurally does a naked steal from Shaw’s St Joan, nevertheless gives way to a much more integrated and feeling second act.  Anne reaches tragic dimensions as one figure on a bloody tapestry of expediency stretching from Henry VIII’s breach with Papal Catholicism to King James I’s initiation of an English translation of the Bible. The second half achieves a complexity and depth where professions of acting for the public good translate the past into the recognizably worst excesses of modern statehood and politics. So no surprise at the end to discover even the foundation of the translation of the King James Authorized Version Bible, given to others to author, turns out to have been a  version filched from an earlier writer and Protestant pioneer, and then twisted for political ends.  An amber stroke green light for a lively and eventually engrossing play and production.  

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Review

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
by Tom Stoppard
Theatre Royal Haymarket SW1

Once More With Feeling

There is a Second World War poem by WH Auden Musee des Beaux Arts  about artistic and human perspectives on suffering, so maybe such ideas have had currency for a long time. But even an old idea can lead to something real and  heart-breaking in the centre. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor Shakespearean characters whom Shakespeare (and possibly his source?) predestines to as grisly an end as most of the other characters in Hamlet.  According to the playwright Tom Stoppard, a fellow journalist on its first night, just over halfway through the 20th century,  was convinced Stoppard's play was actually about “two reporters on a story that doesn’t stand up”. Whatever, the idea of an anachronistic pair in Hamlet out-takes, trying to work out what the hell is going on in the dark and murky world of the King’s court was then new-ish and compelling. Knowing philosophical quips are a bit of a Stoppard trademark (TLT is an expert of course, having experienced, oh, at least four Stoppard plays … ;) ) and some critics have begrudged the clever-clever banter, finding the 1960s' post-modern premise a little dated. TLT had some sympathy for this view during the first half but it all still stands up in the context of the whole play – maybe today’s equivalent could be two elite economics students smugly debating their university theories and computerized financial models  – then after the interval cometh the crunch … (© TLT ;) ). It’s the second half of the story which comes up trumps with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s last journey, a poignant sea voyage,  stateless between Denmark and England, as they carry unwittingly the visa to their execution. Excellent cast http://bit.ly/rgcast and the final journey towards the inevitable eventually clinched it for TLT. An amber light.

Emperor and Galilean Review

Emperor and Galilean by Henrik Ibsen

National Theatre, London SE1

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Bird’s Eye Ibsen

An odd, vertiginous night for TLT and her trusty automated Tonto for Henrik Ibsen’s longest play Emperor and Galilean. Odd for the moments of longeur and even the occasional sneaky peak at the watch. Yet, at the end, with a more aerial view, and arguments and imagery brought together, the experience felt valuable and moving. Set in classical times, it starts as a kind of Scandinavian Hamlet (yes, TLT knows where Elsinore is, but neither Shakespeare nor the Emperor Julian of this play were Scandinavian and Ibsen was!). Then transforms  into some kind of Macbeth before a painful and anguished sacrificial finale. Actually, if one is to have confidence in the conclusions of translation and adaptation, it follows one man’s life from  immature philosopher to warrior leader and final physical and spiritual defeat in the never-ending battle between pagan and Christian. At least, TLT would like to think of it as never-ending rather the more absolute idea of  Third Reich fusion, apparently later adopted by National Socialist philosophy for its own ends. There were junctions when everything sparked with flickerings of contemporary resonance – even with touches of piercing humour to warm up the austere, gargantuan text and design.  But other times it felt just too schematic. Nevertheless the passage from  lush Eastern religiosity through clean classical architecture to modern warfare and then back to the pathos and agony of the ending framed like a painting, classically-clad but New Testament-inspired, did eventually impose a pictorial and sensory logic. The acting was uniformly magnificent; the design, including multimedia, awe-inspiring but the length of the play gave TLT time to reflect  the Olivier is a big stage to fill. So hovering above this with hindsight, a green light for the acting and imagination behind this production, but, factoring in the ups and downs of a long evening, an amber light.