Less Than Kind at Jermyn Street Theatre

Terence Rattigan takes no less a play than Hamlet as his cue for this work of 1944, originally intended as a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence. Commercial pressure led to it being hijacked by Broadway stars of the day, the Lunts - amusingly namechecked in the text - and it eventually emerged, in substantially altered form, as Love in Idleness. The original play, which has never before been staged as written, has been resurrected by Jermyn Street Theatre as part of the Rattigan centenary celebrations and in doing so the theatre has gained the jump on the Old Vic and the Theatre Royal Haymarket with their forthcoming productions of Cause Celebre and Flare Path.

In Less Than Kind Rattigan lifts the central premise from Shakespeare’s play and transplants it to wartime London. Society hostess Olivia Brown has neglected to tell her absent teenage son, Michael, that she is in a relationship with the government minister and noted industrialist Sir John Fletcher. In his years overseas, Michael has become an ardent socialist with an adolescent disinclination to compromise and when he returns home he is appalled to discover the truth of the situation – his mother has neglected to mention the matter in her letters – and immediately takes against Sir John. He can’t abide the man, both the fact that he’s still married and the couple are living quite contentedly in sin, and that, as a wealthy industrialist, he’s emblematic of all Michael claims to despise. He has no qualms about forcing his mother into an impossible choice between her son and her lover. At times the play seems overly pleased with itself as a literary exercise; Rattigan heavily underlines the Hamlet parallels, explicitly pointing out Michael’s antic disposition and making a joke out of his desire that Sir John accompany him to the theatre. The play is a far stronger piece of writing when it is being less overt, when it makes a genuine attempt to explore the emotional ramifications of the situation. The performances help to give necessary weight to Adrian Brown's production. Sara Crowe, as Olivia, is the heart of the piece, a woman who, having found not only a man whom she loves, but a social role at which she excels, is obliged to give it all up for a dingy flat in Baron’s Court. She accepts her situation with dignity and quiet resignation, and gives a sense of someone who is keen to make the best of things no matter what hand life deals her – even when it involves making one’s own powdered egg omelettes and learning to type. There is no sense of resentment towards her son, her love for him is undimmed, and there’s only the – perhaps too faint – trace of anger at her predicament. Facing up to Sir John’s younger, more effortlessly glamorous wife, Crowe combines a kind of scatty nobility with a fragile, faded quality. Michael Simkins is suitably charming as Sir John, a sheen that is maintained even when Rattigan allows Olivia to glimpse the lengths he’ll to which he’ll go to get what he wants. His love for her seems sincere and complete but there’s a slight edge of steel to him which is entirely appropriate to the character. There’s something more unnerving about David Osmond’s Michael with his righteousness and utter lack of concern for his mother’s happiness. There’s a chill to him, a subtle undercurrent of menace to his manipulation, qualities which Osmond’s performance draws out. While the play contains plenty of Rattigan's characteristic warmth and wit, it probably benefits greatly from the intimacy of a space like Jermyn Street Theatre. Exposed on a larger stage, the artifice and the occasional heavy-handedness of tone would be more glaring. This tiny venue is altogether kinder, allowing the play to be appreciated for what it is, not an unearthed masterwork but a piece of considerable interest nonetheless. Reviewed for musicOMH

The Two-Character Play at Jermyn Street Theatre

Though at times elusive, The Two-Character Play is a pleasingly rich and layered piece. First performed in 1967 and rewritten and revised several times since, this rarely performed Tennessee Williams play meshes elements of Pirandello and Beckett’s Endgame with the gothic insularity of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle and a measure of Williams’ own life experiences.

The play’s two characters, Felice and Clare, a brother and sister, are stuck in a chilly, seemingly abandoned theatre in some unspecified city. She is an actress, he a writer. Together they begin to perform their own two character play about another brother and sister, a reclusive pair living in a house in the Deep South surrounded by a wall of sunflowers.
Something ugly and bloody happened to their parents and now the siblings never go outside. The phone has been cut off and the mail is no longer delivered; local kids throw stones at their windows. The pair make half-hearted attempts to reengage with the world, but these always end in self-sabotage.

In one of the play’s more explicit moments, the characters agree that: “theatres are prisons to players and writers of plays.” The idea of insanity and imprisonment ribbons the text. They often speak of becoming 'lost' in the play, to the point that though the space they're performing in is cold, they are able to shed their coats and feel the warmth of a southern summer day. The lines between worlds are blurred.

Both sets of characters, the performers and the roles they inhabit, seem caught in a kind of limbo, forced to loop through the same scenes, never reaching a satisfying conclusion, repeating and repeating, cutting lines, re-writing, tweaking.

It’s easy to see why Williams was so fond of this play. The Two-Character Play is a poetic and elegant, circular and self-aware, containing reflections within reflections; there’s plenty of humour and warmth on display too, which serves to balance out the play’s more impenetrable moments. Gene David Kirk’s production successfully makes the case for it as an exciting, experimental piece of writing, rather than a limp, forgotten thing that’s been dusted down for the sake of it. His staging is incredibly atmospheric, and even when the text sometimes meanders, as it does in places, this necessary sense of intensity is sustained (though an interval - perhaps unnecessary in a play of this length - does threaten to scupper things).

The cast seem completely tuned in to the idiosyncratic rhythms of the text. Both performers ably switch between the two different realities of the piece, their accents deepening as they become submerged in the play within the play. Catherine Cusack is suitably fragile-looking yet not without humour as the twitchy, pill-popping sister while Paul McEwan has a kind of dishevelled dignity as Felice (which extends to his portrayal of the other brother, the one within the play), keeping an ever-watchful eye on his sister yet also clearly beset by his own anxieties.

The staging is simple yet effective. Alice Walkling’s set does double duty for both of the play’s realities and its half-finished, crumbling, cluttered feel is very much in keeping with the mood of the piece, while Kirk keeps a commendably solid grip on this, at times slippery, play right until the end when, as it nears its finish, the lighting is slowly dimmed and the world of the characters is narrowed further until they are finally trapped together in a single spotlight.

Reviewed for musicOMH