Misbegotten shambles

Theatre

Love Letters

(Theatre Royal, Haymarket)

The Cassilis Engagement

(Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond)

Misbegotten shambles

Sheridan Morley

There is something monumentally terrible about the acting of Charlton Heston and of course there always has been; having brought us the tablets as Moses but alas never taken them, having won the chariot race in Gore Vidal's gay Rome (loved Him, hated Hur), he now appears live on stage with all the brisk, charismatic energy of a man carved into Mount Rushmore. To the Theatre Royal Haymarket he comes with his wife, a lady also suffering from a tragic talent bypass, and there they solemnly sit centre stage reading the Love Letters that are at the heart of A.R. Gurney's ancient and creaky epistolary romance.

Gurney has elsewhere established himself as one of the best American playwrights of his generation, and it is ironic that his most commercially successful script should be a two-hander beloved of very ancient Hollywood television and movie stars because it can be read aloud, never apparently has to be learnt or directed, and is therefore ideal for dinner theatres, ocean liners or anywhere that nobody can be bothered with a real production.

You will have gathered that Liaisons Dangereuses this is not; indeed the most exciting thing you can watch here are the potted plants which have been neatly arranged, as at a funeral parlour, around the Hestons' feet. There is at least the chance that they might grow, or change colour, or start talking to us, or just wither and die in sympathy with this whole misbegotten shambles.

Anything here would be better than having to watch the Hestons still inefficiently reading, despite having trailed it around the American and British regions for some years, a script of such terminal boredom that even they seemed to be having trouble staying awake through it on a hot night. Nothing at all happens in the first half, nothing happens again in the second, and then Mrs Heston commits a graceful little suicide, one she signals with a sort of wellbred whimper rather as though she were trying to attract the attention of a salesperson at Harrods on a busy afternoon.

As for Heston, the most moving thing about him is still his hairpiece; better perhaps to have had the Reagans, or even Ike and Mamie back from the grave to plough through this sloppy and cynical marketing exercise. No director is credited, presumably because if named he or she would never work again; the Hestons alas probably will, but with luck not over here.

Having done its best to render the capital impassable by road or rail this summer, the present government or more specifically its London Arts Board now seems intent on making sure there will be no theatres to reach even if you could get there. It is not for me, since I sometimes work there, to comment on yet another official attempt to destroy Dan Crawford's King's Head; but out at Richmond, the other great pioneering fringe theatre is at the end of this week closing its doors at least until January because of inadequate funding.

Since he first opened it in a pub across the road almost 30 years ago, Sam Walters's remarkable playhouse has alone been responsible for the rediscovery of writers such as Rodney Ackland and John Whiting, and for unearthing long-forgotten Victorian and other scripts which far better-funded theatres, many with literary advisers, had somehow managed to overlook. The Orange Tree situation is not directly analogous to that of the King's Head, but the simple truth is that, unless more funding is found and very fast indeed, we are going to see at the very least a sharp drop in the number of productions it can afford to stage next year.

But the theatre is going into its involuntary six-month darkness with a characteristically fascinating retrieval; St John Hankin was the Edwardian dramatist who at the age of 39 jumped into a river with barbells tied around his neck, quite possibly in despair that his unique style of `English Chekhov' would never be popular with an audience still temperamentally inclined to favour the rather more plot-heavy followers of Ibsen.

And it is true that not a lot happens in The Cass*lis Engagement (1907 and unrevived until now), except that a downmarket mother from hell and her seductively charming daughter descend on a countryhouse aristocracy of which the son has crossed class barriers to get engaged to the girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Plots are laid to break up the affair, and Hankin has a good time satirising the pretensions of both classes; true the play owes a good deal to both Pygmalion and Trelawny of the Wells, but it has been elegantly and wittily directed by Auriol Smith and is wonderfully played by Octavia Walters and David Timson among an ensemble which has been doing such consistently good work at Richmond for almost a year. If it all has to end like this, and the Orange Tree can never again afford a permanent company doing almost a dozen productions a year, then the London theatrical scene will have been very severely weakened.

Copyright Spectator Jul 17, 1999
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