Alphabetical Order

I was amused by this revival of an early Michael Frayn play at the Hampstead Theatre, but left feeling a bit disappointed.  Walking into the theatre and looking at the set produced a wonderful feeling of deja vu.  It's a beautifully reconstructed newspaper cuttings library from the 1970s, with dozens of filing cabinets spewing open their contents and piles of paper everywhere.  The warm-hearted but chaotic librarian Lucy (Imogen Stubbs) runs not so much an information service but a social centre which provides tea and sympathy for the team of misfits who run the newspaper.  Lucy tells her new colleague Lesley that the best place to sort things out is on the floor, because every morning the cleaners will tidy up and put everything back on the desk.  I became a journalist in 1971 and remember my visits as a junior subeditor to the Reuters cuttings library in Fleet Street, in which stories off the teleprinter were carefully filed by country and subject.  For UK stories we could also consult the voluminous Press Association cuttings library on a different floor.  There was an hourly tea trolley with an urn and iced buns, and the lifts were full of aged messengers smoking Woodbines. It's a time capsule of the pre-computer era, but it's gradually apparent that despite the setting, Frayn's play isn't really about the newspaper business. Not much happens in the first act, which does little more than establish the characters and set up the contrast between Lucy and Lesley, the gimlet-eyed newcomer who lacks a sense of humour but clearly has a talent for organisation.  When act two opens, the library has been transformed;  the mess has disappeared, the broken chairs have gone, the cuttings spilling onto the floor have been neatly filed, and the only reminder of the previous chaos is the jumble on Lucy's desk, now separated by several yards of green carpet from Lesley's.  Lesley has taken over, but somehow Frayn holds back from exploring the conflict between the two women which could and should be the core of the play.  Lesley has somehow taken over Lucy's boyfriend John because she feels he needs a bit of order in his life, but Lucy doesn't seem to mind that much.  The sparks never really fly;  most of the other characters also have offstage personal lives, but they never come alive where it counts -- on stage.  When there's a sudden deus ex machina moment in act two as the paper's closure is announced, it's a bit of a let-down because this key development is completely external. It has nothing to do with the characters, unless one blames their general indolence.  The paper's closure sparks a frenzy of childish anarchy as all the characters except Lesley open the files and scatter them in the air.  Then Lesley reappears and announces plans for that night's edition to come out as normal; there is even talk of a workers' takeover.  But although this is a neatish ending, it's all a bit of an anticlimax.  None of the characters have really travelled anywhere or developed, or interacted with each other or learned anything.  There is one aspect to the play which intrigued me, however.  I doubt whether Frayn, a former Guardian journalist, was consciously trying to use the newspaper archive as a metaphor for 1970s Britain, but with the benefit of hindsight, Lesley is a precursor of Margaret Thatcher.  Written a decade later, this might have been a more political play.  As it stands, it's weak on action and plot, although it has some very witty dialogue.  Frayn stands on a pedestal as far as I am concerned, not so much for his widely praised Copenhagen as for his masterpiece Noises Off.  He does have a tendency to philosophize, a bit like Tom Stoppard, but he doesn't always succeed in integrating his ideas with the action of the play.  Alphabetical Order seems to have been inspired by Frayn's fascination for how we make sense of the world by ordering and classifying it. But it doesn't quite translate into a play.  This production by Christopher Luscombe is perfectly competent and the cast do what they can with the limited range of human emotions the playwright offers them.  In the original 1975 Hampstead production Lucy was played by the great Billie Whitelaw, and I would love to have seen her in the role.