FAME, FRAUD AND FAMILY
Long after it opened, a massive hit both sides of the Atlantic, and finally closed , the enterprising Finborough hauls out a 1921 A.A.Milne play for the first time in a hundred years. It has absolutely nothing in common with Christopher Robin or Pooh: more like a more comedic Arthur Miller or Priestley tale in its merciless dissection of family politics, money and reputation. But the fun in doing it now lies also in what it tells us about celebrity a hundred years ago: less techno than today but every bit as corrosive.
Old Oliver Blayds is to be toasted by his family on his 90th birthday, with the addition of a literary critic, A.L. Royce, presenting a festschrift address from younger, admiring poets. He is, says Royce “a very great poet, a very great philosopher, and a very great man,.simple as Wordsworth, sensuous as Tennyson, passionate as Swinburne”. His portrait hangs over head, but the old man himself (played by the 88-year-old veteran William Gaunt ) only gets wheeled in – a beautifully retro chair, the Finborough is always careful – towards the end of the first long act. But we have by then learned that his devoted daughter Isobel (Catherine Cusack) has been his nurse and companion for 18 years, having turned down a proposal from Royce to dedicate herself to the ancient genius.
His son-in-law and secretary William Blayds-Conway (a beautifully pompous Oliver Beamish) is there too, with his dim wife Marion (Karen Archer a comedy turn of anxious entitlement) and grandchildren Oliver and Septima. They all (except George Rowlands as the cheeky young Oliver) respect the 70-year career, quoting poems like “A child’s thoughts on waking”, a shuddery title which neatly identifies him as, to quote the critic, “the last Victorian”.
Gaunt gives us a lovely, vaguish, amiably delightful old man when he arrives, reminiscing about what Browning or Whistler said to him alongside properly worrying flashes of temper and confusion, soothed by Isobel. The trouble is that , as he begins to confess as the scene ends, he never wrote any of the great poems at all. Only the unsuccessful 1863 volume which nobody liked. He stole the rest , from a dying, Keats-like roommate called Jenkins, and eked them out over 70 years of fame and worship.
Wonderful. So in the next act, meeting again after the funeral, Isobel comes clean and the family has to work out morally and practically what to do. Isobel has a conscience, and managed to prevent him being buried in Poet’s Corner in the Abbey by saying he forbade it. She wants the Jenkins heirs, if any, found and paid and the poor dead boy genius made immortal instead of her father.
William and Marion are horrified, and when the grandchildren realize there’s money to be lost, so are they. Milne takes us mercilessly through layers of shocked disbelief, resentment, desperate self-delusion and mutual contempt. At one point the Blayds-Conways work out that he did at least get the stuff published, so is owed 10 per cent. At another, young Oliver (who is starting out in politics) persuades them it might all have been a senile hallucination.
David Gilmore, directing, respects the 1921 theatrical pace, and it goes on to a third act though I would have been mischievously tempted to tweak and speed up the end to suit modern tastes. But what I took away from it is how the family and the critic under the great looming Victorian portrait talk of Blayds’ greatness in phrases like “He looked like the great man he was” and “He talked so well about poetry”. He looked the part, talked the part, developed a magnificent beard and a gift for seeming amiably modest yet wise. These days, he’d have been a national treasure on TV, though the poems probably far less read. So whether he wrote any of the stuff all by himself would hardly matter…
finboroughtheatre.co.uk to 4 October
rating four
theatreCat 