John Morrison

Drawing The Line

There are plays which are technically superb but never quite get into top gear, while others that are deeply flawed (John Osborne's are a good example) grab the audience by the guts and won't let go. This new one by Howard Brenton at the Hampstead Theatre is an example of the first sort.  Written with Brenton's characteristic skill, it plucks out from the pages of the the history books a largely forgotten but crucial person whose decisions had enormous consequences.

By the time Cyril Radcliffe, a judge who knew nothing about India, was picked by the Attlee government to go to Delhi and decide the frontiers that would divide India and Pakistan, the train was already hurtling down the tracks.  Wherever he drew the fateful line on the map during his rushed five-week assignment, it would be bound to spark mass killings.  'I am what the Americans call a patsy,' he exclaims.  It's a brilliant theme for a play about a traumatic historical episode;  Brenton stumbled on it while on holiday in India, and instinctively saw Radcliffe's story as a great subject for drama.

I'm not going to start judging whether the play is fair or unfair to Radcliffe, the Mountbattens, Nehru, Jinnah and Gandhi because I don't know enough about the period.  Mountbatten emerges as a hypocritical colonial stuffed shirt, first telling Radcliffe he cannot as Viceroy influence his work, and then at the last minute intervening to twist the frontier to India's advantage.  Did he succumb to pressure from his wife Edwina, who was having an affair with Nehru? Was he trying to win her back, as Brenton suggests?  Is it plausible for Mountbatten to describe Nehru in a flash of anger as 'your darkie' and to use the word 'wog'?  I doubt it, but any dramatist has licence to invent.  What bothers me more is that the story skims the surface.  Howard Davies, who also directed Brenton's 55 Days at Hampstead (the trial and execution of Charles I) draws out some excellent performances from a large cast, but they don't quite have enough to get their teeth into in the way that Mark Gatiss did with Charles I.  There are bigger historical themes lurking behind the story of Partition than emerge in this play.  Brenton, by deciding early on not to create any real villains or heroes, has ended up by making one of the bloodiest tragedies of the 20th century into a somewhat bloodless play.

 

Lizzie Siddal

'You must feel such grief.'

'I take it to dull the pain.'

'We are artists. We must have a surfeit of everything!'

'Was it really seven years ago you placed your poems in Lizzie's coffin?'

Yes, there's some clunky writing in this new play at the Arcola, but it's balanced by excellent acting which makes it well worth seeing.  Jeremy Green's choice of subject is the striking red-haired model and artist who became the muse for several of the pre-Raphaelites, had a long relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and died of laudanum poisoning at an early age.  Lizzie is played by the equally striking red-haired Emma West, and this serendipitous casting is the foundation of Lotte Wakeham's production.  The rest of the players are excellent too -- Tom Bateman as the tousle-haired and feckless Rossetti, Daniel Crossley as the clipped and patronising John Ruskin, Simon Darwen as William Holman Hunt, James Northcote as John Everett Millais and Jayne Wisener as the sharp-tongued Cockney model Annie Miller.

Lizzie was a seamstress and the daughter of a shopkeeper, but in her opening scene she comes across as very well spoken and well educated -- not just an intelligent Victorian lower middle-class girl who could read and write, but a modern Oxbridge graduate.  This rather plays down the difference in class and status between Lizzie and the gentlemen artists who paid her sixpence an hour, though there is plenty of misogyny and prejudice on show, particularly from Holman Hunt.   The best scenes in the play bring the characters to life, but there's something all too predictable about this bio-drama that fails to really challenge the audience and suggests the Victorians were really quite like us.  Scenes repeatedly start by someone calling on someone else for no particular reason, and it's always an awkward moment because someone else is about to leave.  Some key scenes in Lizzie's life, such as the moment when Rossetti finally marries her, are omitted, only to be recalled and described later.  The way the story is told might work on BBC4 but it falls well short of great theatre.  In one scene Ruskin tells Lizzie that he has persuaded Rossetti to propose to her;  when Rossetti arrives, he fails to do so.  Whereupon she challenges him: 'He said you were coming here to propose!'   The scene would have worked infinitely better if Lizzie had kept her despair to herself and allowed the audience to feel it.  That's what Chekhov does when Lopakhin is left alone to propose to Varya in The Cherry Orchard. Varya doesn't express her feelings, and we're left to imagine her pain.  The reason why the Victorian era fascinates us is the gap between what was said and what was felt, but it's rarely glimpsed in this play.

Until the very last moment we don't get to see any pre-Raphaelite art or get to grips with its peculiar sensibility.  That artistic decision may be a mistake.  I remember how much I enjoyed Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, which skilfully shows us not just the characters making the art, but the art itself, projected on to a screen.  This is an artistic choice that interests me a lot, as I'm working on my own play about art at the moment.  Though it's far more important to create convincing characters than to project images on a screen, I'm inclined to believe that in most plays about art it's better to show it rather than just talk about it.  Imagine how diminished Peter Shaffer's Amadeus would be if there was no music.