1939: TWO NATIONS, TWO MEN, TWO WIVES
It has a familiar sitcom structure: a couple whose marriage is not what it respectably seems, making anxious preparations for weekend guests. Said guests unaware of bohemian structures beneath the necessary decorum of welcome. Awkwardness over drinks, a mother-in-law mentioning the elephant in the room a bit too early. Guests conferring in the bedroom, mistrustful unease over a social event, separate confidences between the two men and two women. There’s even a scandalous bedroom discovery and, at one point, a dropped tray.
But Richard Nelson’s is a beguiling history-play, set in 1939 on the eve of WW2 and inspired by a correspondence found 25 years ago between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his confidant and probable mistress, Daisy Suckley (delicately played by Rachel Pickup). It imagines the moment when FDR invited George VI and his queen to round off their Canadian tour and brief visit to the World’s Fair by visiting him in the countryside: at his mother’s house by the Hudson.
It was the first visit of a British monarch since the American revolution, and dthe aim was for intimate informality: the invitation letter is fascinatingly reproduced in the programme. The King, pitchforked into the job after the abdication three years before snf, stammeringly shy, hopes for US support against Hitler. Both men are aware that many of the American people consider this distant war to be none of their business, nor – as FDR bluntly says – will they necessarily be on the British side once they decide it is. Anyway as the President unkindly remarks, “you already owe us a fortune from the last war”.
An added complication is Eleanor, by this time highly independent and influential, willing to play the wife role despite having decamped to live elsewhere (among furniture-makers who, as shocked Elizabeth says “are women who like each other”). She has organized an entertainment with native-American drums and beer and a hot dog picnic. Around this shockingly informality revolve a lot of the anxious diplomatic conversations and much of young Queen Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon’s worries about royal dignity. Will the King’s eventual beer and hot dog (with mustard) seal the Special Relationship?
It’s history, and in the end it sort of did. But Nelson’s interest is in the interlocking personalities of that moment: Robert Lindsay’s magnificent, battered, drily ironic President crippled with polio and Andrew Havill’s anxious, shy, bravely benign King – “Bertie”, ashamed of his stammer. And the women: Jemma Redgrave is the left-liberal, republically inclined and militantly determined Eleanor (so nice that it’s a Redgrave,: shades of Vanessa in her vigorous remarks about royalty being “like out of Grimm..they don’t mean anything” ). As to Elizabeth, née Bowes-Lyon and later our Queen Mother, Rebecca Night gives her a slightly stroppy anxiety. This is maonly for her gentle husband’s weakness., but also doubts the good faith of FDR and Eleanor: there are magazines in her room mocking the absurd foreign visitors, notably her for not beeing chic like Wallis Simpson. Seeing the guest list names for the picnic she cries “German, Italian, they;re Irish, they’re Jewish, they hate us!” Her final conversation with Eleanor and capitulation to hot-dog diplomacy is beautifully done.
It all is. One companion felt Havill cast too old for Bertie (who was just over 40) but his depiction of that heroic, shy, fragile but determined King was for me something too perfect to care about that. Your heart goes out to him. Robert Lindsay’s battered, wily, decent silver-fox of a President is equally fine, again probably cast too old, but who cares: he’s glorious, judged to a hair. Late at night with the women out of hearing, when he tells Bertie his father would be proud of him..well, call me sentimental, but….
So I loved it, both as entertainment (there are some shockingly good laughs) and as material for refletion on the interaction of personality , influence, image and hard history. Especially right now, with such a President , such a King, such differently competitive dignities and such an anxiety about whether wars on the European continent are strong, rich, America’s “business”.
hampsteadtheatre.com to 15 July
rating 4
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