Lloyd Evans
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Pygmalion
Old Vic
Osborne crushed Rattigan. Crudely stated, that’s what we’re told happened in 1956 when Osborne’s demotic new voice displaced Rattigan’s classier, cosier manner. Even now Rattigan’s reputation hasn’t fully recovered and The Deep Blue Sea, which premièred in 1952, is the first of his plays I’ve seen in the West End. And guess what? It feels exactly like Look Back in Anger. The setting is identical — a shabby flat. The storyline uses the same torrid love triangle. Two similar outlooks are examined: reckless youth is contrasted with safe, dull conservatism. And both plays have a familiarly rancid atmosphere. Post-war England, burdened with snobbery and sexual prudishness, is a squalid community where emotional torpor and an oppressive pettiness seep into every pore. But Rattigan’s play is richer and easier to watch than anything Osborne wrote in the 1950s. As a dramatist he’s more relaxed, his talent is more evenly spread, and there’s far more of it. He can write all kinds of characters sympathetically whereas Osborne is only at home with males, and particularly with male pontificators, who roam the stage spouting a peculiar strain of toxic lamentation.
The play opens with a suicide gone wrong. Hester Collyer is separated from her lawyer husband Sir William and has shacked up with Freddie, a dashing alcoholic test-pilot. Lonely old Sir William pines for Hester but she still loves Freddie, who no longer loves her. Explaining that lot takes a good half an hour but once the machinery is in place the story trundles forward with a horrible and gripping momentum. Simon Williams is a natural comedian but he stoutly suppresses the urge to send up the good-natured, pompous Sir William. He gets laughs all right but they’re always in tune with the production. Freddie is played by Dugald Bruce-Lockhart, an athletic charmer who precisely captures the booze-soaked chumminess and crazed bonhomie of the out-of-control pilot. He seems a touch too young for the role of Hester’s lover and yet the sensuous Greta Scacchi makes their affair credible, and in the harrowing final act she presents the character’s dilemma with a raw and heart-wrenching immediacy. Several times during this play I felt like leaping up and shouting, ‘Oh ditch Freddie, you twit, and go home with boring old Sir William.’ That’s the sign of great drama. You forget it’s a play and start thinking you’re at home, behind the curtains, watching some ghastly domestic in the street.
Another revolutionary Fifties play, The Birthday Party, has returned to the Lyric where it premièred half a century ago. David Farr’s production makes sense of Pinter’s bizarre attempt to write a crime thriller in the new absurdist style. Justin Salinger is an absorbing, welcoming Stanley and Nicholas Woodeson fizzes with menacing energy as Goldberg. Just occasionally — during the game of blindman’s bluff — Woodeson slips out of character and into a Pinter panto of his own imagining, skedaddling around the stage like a woodentop on speed. The role of Meg, that regal dimwit, is done with a gloriously light touch by Sheila Hancock, who has discovered yet another role that perfectly suits her raffish slovenliness. It all works extremely well but then we know what to expect. In 1958 this play ran for a week. Now officially crowned ‘a classic’ it runs for barely three and I detect no loud clamour to bring it into the West End. Pinter has a strange sort of greatness. He’s like some mythical outlaw whose reputation outshines his deeds. Everyone talks about him but no one wants to see him face to face.
To yet another classic. Bernard Shaw can be a better pamphleteer than a playwright and it’s amazing that his best-known comedy Pygmalion isn’t more seriously marred by its preachy sideswipes at ‘middle-class morality’. Peter Hall’s near-faultless production is gorgeous to look at and boasts three stunning performances. Tim Pigott-Smith turns Higgins into a lovable intellectual bumpkin. Michelle Dockery’s Eliza is hilariously solemn and Tony Haygarth’s rapid-fire Alfred Doolittle races through Shaw’s dialogue at well over the speed limit but makes every word count. The sets and costumes are exceptionally handsome and Eliza’s undulous cream dress in Act III is as exquisite as a swan on the wing. So where’s the fault? The script. It peaks too early, in the first half. Everything that follows ‘not bloody likely’ — a sublime moment of comedy — is wordy and frictionless by comparison. Shaw might have learnt a lesson about dramatic escalation from Rattigan. Save the best, or worst, till last.
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