A TIME CAPSULE OF OPEN MARRIAGE
I am pleased to find out about Miles Malleson: an Edwardian student joker, WW1 conscientious objector, Bolshevist, founder of Left drama groups and the actor who played the poetic hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets who instists on the silken rope for a Duke. He was also a playwright, and we owe this revival – its first London production apparently – to the New York director Jonathan Bank of Mint Theater, over here and he says enjoying a British cast.
It is a fascinating time capsule of 1930 psychology as applied to a particular social set attempting “open marriage”, and serendipitously perfect to follow this theatre’s Jules et Jim , which was about the confusions of sexual freedom and open marriages, 30 years later in the 1960’s. Malleson’s central couple are Anne and Stephen – Guy Lewis as the nervy, restless husband, first seen ranting about his father the Canon – “Padre”” – who was also his school housemaster, and who he regards as bigoted by stiff Victorian Christianity. Amusingly, when the Padre drops in he uses almost the same words about stubbornness as he son does about him. Anne (Laura Doddington) is soothing and approving of their philosophy of freedom, encouraging Stephen in his sudden fancy for their friend, the glamorous widowed Diana. She herself has had a past affair, with Stephen’s approval, with the onlooking, amused, slightly concerned Dr Alan (Dominic Marsh).
In the flawlessly genteel set, pottery and tea-table and settee, these are the inter-war freethinkers: Malleson’s people, inspired by the Woolfish Bloomsbury Group. These were people for whom it was almost de rigeur to let Bertrand Russell have a go at one’s wife (the great moral philosopher cuckolded a willing Malleson around the same time he was making TS Eliot so miserable). They are even running a freethinking school together. So his insider eye catches the well-meaning earnestness of these people, sympathetically set against the stiff – though equally well-meaning – principles of the cricket-mad Padre. For whom interest in sex is only going to lead to “illness, lunacy and wrecked lives”.
But importantly, he dives right into the awkward natural human problem total liberation throws up. Anne finds she is jealous: Doddington perfectly evokes the battle between baffled instinct and lofty freethinking principles (and in the final scene, surprises us). Stephen is a big baby, less mature than her, thinking it’s all fine and especially good for the book he is supposed to be writing. But he’s miserable when he finds she minds, and even more miserable when he gets a taste of his own medicine and nobly, tearfully has to fight a primitive instinct to “go all pistols and horsewhips and call you a wanton”. The metaphor which the pair find late on is a nice one: they are forever balancing on a narrow ridge between featherbedded moral cosiness and life-seizing, inspiring adventure.
There’s ironic humour in that, but also a real sympathy in the portrait of people genuinely groping around for a better way to live, love and mate in a post-Victorian,age rattled and shocked by WW1. When Anne feels humiliated at her husband being known to stray, he asks with real bafflement ‘why should you care about what that kind of people think?” . There is even space given to the old Padre’s idea that it’s worth hanging on to fidelity for the sake of something “spiritual’ in a marriage bond. Interestingly, it made me reflect on how, despite those freethinking 30s and the even more freethinking 60s, nothing’s changed: in modern soap-opera culture there is uproar and disapproval about “cheating” even if it’s just a drunken kiss.
It’s perfectly performed, not least by Dominic Marsh as the often silent, thoughtful Dr Alan, who sees through the whole delusion of sacred-infidelity. My only unwelcome distraction was a small first-scene costume one: why, with a daytime tea-table on set, Anne informal and Stephen in shirtsleeves and braces, is Diana wearing in a full-on spangly bare-backed cocktail frock?
jermynstreettheatre.co.uk to 1 July Well worth it. Rating 4
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