One of my many recurring nightmares when I was Reuters chief correspondent in Paris in the early 1980s was about getting beaten by the opposition on the death of the elderly Duchess of Windsor. The telephone number of her formidable lawyer and connection to the outside world, Maitre Suzanne Blum, held pride of place in our contacts book and was pointed out to every new arrival in the bureau. (We also worried about the death of that other famous Parisian recluse Marlene Dietrich, but she was a decade younger than the Duchess). When the Duchess finally passed on in 1986, it was a bit of an anticlimax as the news was announced not by Maitre Blum but by Buckingham Palace.
Nicholas Wright's new play at the Hampstead Theatre is about a writer who got rather closer to the strange world of the Duchess and her lawyer than I ever did. Caroline Blackwood sparred with the formidable Matrie Blum for several years on behalf of the Sunday Times colour magazine, eventually writing her profile rather than that of her initial target, the Duchess. After both the Duchess and Blum were dead, Blackwood finally published her memoir The Last of the Duchess in 1995. She died the following year. It was Wright's long-time theatrical collaborator Sir Richard Eyre who had the idea of adapting the book for the stage.
The first thing to be said about this production is that it provides a feast of good acting. Sheila Hancock captures the hard-as-nails Blum to perfection. Bossy, irritating, snobbish and possibly delusional, she suddenly reveals an Achilles heel of vanity when Blackwood suggests that if Lord Snowdon can't photograph the Duchess, he might do a portrait of her instead. Anna Chancellor, furtively swilling vodka from her capacious shoulderbag, struggling to get her tape recorder to work and dropping her papers on the floor, creates a wonderful Lady Blackwood, a blue-blooded rebel who, like the Duchess, was married three times. Acting a character who's had several vodkas too many and is desperately trying to remain functional sounds quite easy; it isn't, and many actors overplay it. Anna Chancellor delivers a masterclass in aristocratic squiffiness. There's excellent backup from John Heffernan as Blum's puppyish young assistant Michael Bloch and Angela Thorne as Diana Mosley.
The play is essentially a two-hander, with the supporting characters helping out with plot, backstory and exposition, rather like the boys and girls who run after the balls at Wimbledon. Wright used a similar pattern in his very successful play Vincent in Brixton nearly a decade ago, which took the documented stay of the young Vincent van Gogh in London and imagined his relationship with his landlady. In that play Wright was able to invent more freely than he can here, limited as he is by the version told by Blackwood in her memoir. There's a richly comic opening scene where Chancellor's character dreams about meeting the Duchess herself, but then we're back in the world of reality as Blackwood and Blum begin sparring. In fact, the story is quite a thin one, though it's skilfully told. In the final scene Blum and Blackwood really let fly at each other, but there's no real revelation or plot twist to get the story into top gear, and the climax of the play seems a bit artificial.
That's the problem with sticking a little too closely to reality. I am tempted to compare this play with John Hodge's Collaborators, which I saw last week. That began with a fragment of truth -- a telephone call between Joseph Stalin and Mikhail Bulgakov -- and created a vertiginous structure of surreal fantasy. Real stories are more tricky, though Frost-Nixon is a good example of how to bring it off successfully. But in that case the true story was a more powerful one, with a natural climax in the televised confrontation between the two main characters.
Wright, interviewed in the Hampstead theatre programme, acknowledges that the Duchess herself was 'the most unrewarding woman to think about'. Somewhere inside this play is a better one struggling to get out -- possibly one that is less about celebrity and more about death. Wright seems to be moving in this direction at times, but doesn't quite get there.
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