THE WAY IT WAS
Ah, the forgotten plays of the 30s and 40s, how they lure me to basements and pub rooms and tunnels: Jermyn and Finborough and Southwark in particular! Like contemporaneous novels ,they bristle with real social history, the how-it-felt of great-grandparents’ life and work. Especially work: few plays now properly reflect that aspect of life, unless the trade or company is being condemned for capitalism.
This one for instance,was a West End and Broadway hit in 1933 with Celia Johnson, and deals with the world Merton Hodge was familiar with: the five-year grind of study far from home, medical students in Edinburgh living in Mrs McFie’s boarding-house . Boarding houses are a rich mainstay of drama from 1900-1950s, and beautifully set here in Geoffrey Beevers’ production with Carla Evans’ design painstakingly careful, right down to the dresser with shining china, the mouldy copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and some elegant scene-change work with tablecloths and doilies.
Hodge was, alongside prolific playwriting success, a working doctor, an anaesthetist. Jenny Lee is a solid, unimpressed but kindly Mrs McFie and the students are well delineated: Mark Lawrence ganglingly flippant as Gil, Harvey Cole a solid golfing John, David Furlong as the (quite possibly gay, and very fascinating) French senior, who creates in our hero a frisson which might have been unacceptable if the Lord Chamberlain had noticed it, and above all Joe Pitts as the almost preternaturally innocent mother’s boy Charles. He thinks he will marry the girl his mother approves of when he goes back down south but who of course encounters a more interesting and subtle girl through the Frenchman.
It has a dangerously long, slow-burning establishing opening half; I’d have trimmed it. But it picks up beautifully after the interval, when a few years have passed and Jill comes up to see him (Helen Reuben, doing the infuriating coy flapper for all it’s worth) escorted by her pal Roger, a caddish cocktail-jockey played with devilish comedy by Lynton Appleton (the hair alone is worth the money, and as for the Oxford bags, words fail me). Joe Pitts has the difficult role of Charles as far too slowly he becomes a grownup and admits what he wants and needs; modern young audiences of the Tinder-and-hookup age may find the whole process utterly baffling. But it is educational and fascinating to enter into the dutiful mental world of middle-class students from only 90 years ago. It convinces: if anyone had murdered Jill, a not unlikely denouement given her frightful carry-on, it’d be Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple who solved the crime.
Finboroughtheatre.co.uk To 5 august
theatreCat 