1948 AND ALL THAT
Right now, the birth of the NHS in 1948 is more than appropriate to write about (there’s another play about Nye Bevan next week). For as the most jaded doctor predicts late in the play, the gift and joy of free healthcare would never be enough – “the beautiful new girlfriend is bound to become the tired snappish wife who keeps you waiting too long for your supper”.
So as Britain fights to revive its old passion, what fitter direction for the politically witty Lucy Kirkwood (remember Chimerica?) than an ironic tribute to another 1940s monument: Brief Encounter: monochrome Pathé News, waisted coats, modest stout hats, railway carriage banter and occasional swells of romantic music. It is all there and nimbly staged: only this time the housewife is the doctor: Iris Elcock, GP, local councillor , housewife married to another GP and earnest assistant to a flamboyantly sweary Labour woman minister. She wants to be a MP and change things for the poor.
The man is of another world and mindset: George is a local boy long emigrated to middling Hollywood fame, married to a starlet, never votes or gives a damn. But oh, the chemistry of middle-aged temptation! They meet first of course on a train (the set, a spare revolving square of light, becomes with neat scooting furniture changes an office, home, train, seafront)., Hours later, on a home visit, she is doing a discreet intimate examination of a cantankerous old lady when her son walks in. George!
They spark all the genteel fire of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard but with added political argument, and are wonderfully matched. Keeley Hawes gives Iris a worn maternal loveliness and luminous benignity about her work and causes; Jack Davenport irresistibly handles the Coward-esque dry wit of George’s lines, cynicism covering increasing need. Iris’ husband Julian is a lame war hero, and one of the majority of doctors who furiously opposed the National Health Service Act because they didn’t want to be state employees: Bevan finally had, he sourly said, to ‘stuff their mouths with gold”. He resents his wife’s ambition and socialist fire – at one point humiliatingly rejects her “pawing at him” to try and revive their marriage. Later we will, fleetingly, learn better of old pre-war self. As for George’s wife – well, late on in a slightly unnecessary dramatic reveal, we learn more of her too.
Hawes and Davenport are wonderful, rich passion warring with adult responsibilities; around them the outer world of 1948 and its attitudes comes alive, from social unease to the arrival of Dior’s shockingly wasteful New Look. Deft doubling and trebling of roles actually helps: Siobhan Redmond is the fiery minister (very Barbara Castle), several patients and also Iris’s crisply snobbish sister-in-law – “People are romantic about the working-class since the war, but meet one, they are so bovine” as she laments the loss of 193s middle-class comfort and way of life. Tom Goodman-Hill’s Julian is nine other people, Pearl Mackie about eleven: but the direction by Michael Longhurst and Ann Yee means that both this shape-shifting and the filmic, fast-changing scenes on the open set do much to create a sense of an evolving period. Iris’s child, to her socialist despair, is obsessed with pictures of Princess Elizabeth’s wedding-dress.
Onstage cameras and high moody monochrome closeups overhead are used with unusual economy and taste , evoking the eternal tangle of politics and human emotion. I have rarely seen this fashionable stage technology done better. Kirkwood as ever has some lines too good to spoil in a review, but given today’s repellent political culture it is good to report how angry Siobhan Redmond’s minister is at Nye Bevan’s famous description of Tories as “lower than vermin”. She felt it alienated people from the fast-closing window of real change, because British people simply won’t tolerate rudeness.
A terrific, grown-up and engrossing history play. And for me, fascinating to come to after an afternoon watching Southwark’s “Cable Street” on the other side of the river and the far side of WW2. (review later). Sometimes a double theatre day just meshes and clicks…
Donmarwarehouse.com to 13 April
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