“My bad”, as the young folks say, choosing this one.
These days, I usually avoid plays written in the “between the wars” period; there’s something about them stylistically that tends to grate on me and especially on Janie.
This one, by Robert Graves, never previously performed, seemed like such interesting subject matter for its time, from such a fine writer, I thought we might be in for a winner.
Here is the Finborough resource that drew us in, now with post-production links too.
It’s probably not the best idea for me and Janie to go to longer, wordy plays on a Friday evening, even at the best of times. But this was at the end of a hot and steamy week…
…a very wordy play with a disproportionately long first “half”…
…I thought the play might usefully be renamed “But It Still Goes On And On And On”…
…we ducked out at the interval and retreated to Noddyland via Mohsen.
Clearly many people and indeed a fair proportion of the reviewers, really liked this play/production. Here is a link that finds reviews, good, bad and ugly.
To be fair, there was quite a lot to like about the production, as is usually the case at the Finborough. The cast were very good and the production tried to invoke a 1920s atmosphere pretty well, given the limited space and resources available in a room above above a pub; albeit one of the very best pub theatres on the planet.
It was the play that proved to be a let down for us. Hugely stereotypical characters; angst of the spoilt brat variety amongst the privileged classes…
…yes, of course we did feel sympathy with the characters who had suffered in the Great War and those who were struggling with their necessarily suppressed (in that era) feelings of various sexuality. But by gosh was it laid on with a wordy trowel and some ludicrous sub-plots.
It reminded me a bit of The Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner; an Austrian existential angst play from the same era which, several years ago, also had us out of the theatre early, missing the rather inevitable tragic ending:
Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner, Cottesloe Theatre, 7 November 2009
Further, I don’t think Robert Graves was a natural for play-writing and although the probable reason that the play was originally hidden/unperformed for many decades was its overt references to sexuality, I’d suggest that one of the other reasons was that those who commissioned it and others who subsequently looked at it decided that the play was not much good.
Given the subject matter, the play is, of course, an interesting curiosity in our modern era and I can see why the Finborough decided to produce it.
The acting was very good on the whole; Alan Cox played the lead role; his daddy Brian Cox (the actor, not the pop-scientist) was in the audience to watch him the night we were there.
We’re still fans of the Finborough; we just didn’t like this play.
