A.A. Milne's 1921 play The Truth About Blayds is about to be revived at the Finborough Theatre in London. This is good news as Milne's plays for adults are rarely produced these days. William Gaunt is playing the Blayds of the title, an elderly, much-revered, poet; having played King Lear as well as sitcom patriarchs he ought to have the necessary gravitas.
Milne had a run of hit plays in Britain and America between the wars but Blayds, more serious in tone than most, did not receive the level of acclaim he thought it deserved, and it rankled: he dwelt upon its reception in his 1939 autobiography It's Too Late Now, his disappointment still keen almost twenty years after the event.
The problem, as he saw it, was that after the first act critics and audiences seemed to be expecting a different sort of play:
The Truth About Blayds ... was not a Story of Literary Life, nor a Study of a Literary Fraud. My interest in it was the interest which I took in this problem: What happens in a religious community when its god is discovered to be a false god? To work out this problem I could choose any community, any god, convenient to me ... if the devastating truth were known, who would still be faithful, who unfaithful? And faithful to what? The Truth or the God? I decided to illustrate the theme with the story of a great poet; showing the reactions of his family to a death-bed confession ...
Over six pages of his memoirs he describes the play in detail: the individual members of the family whose characters are established before we hear a word from Blayds himself; the trick he then uses to convince the audience that Blayds (Milne's creation, not based on a real literary figure) is indeed a great writer. When Blayds speaks for the first time:
... immediately the High Priest whips out a pencil and makes a note of it on his cuff. The audience breaks into laughter, telling itself how infuriating it must be for genius to have its simplest remark recorded. From now on he is free to speak at my own level, and still be a genius.
Earlier, when one character starts to quote from Blayds' best-known poem he is swiftly interrupted; the audience has heard enough to have the impression of Great Poetry.
It's not until Blayds is killed off, however, that we get to the real meat of the play, as far as its author is concerned - the range of responses to a deception which has been uncovered:
We have got the necessary, but unsignificant, First Act out of the way, now we can command the audience's interest for the development of our theme ...
But it was not so. I discovered, when it was too late, that I was fighting a losing battle against that First Act. I had taken too much care over it. I had established the Great Man so firmly that for most of the audience Blayds, the living Blayds, was now the play. The audience had seen him, had believed in him, and wanted to go on seeing him. As consolation, the critics told me that it was the best First Act ever written, but there, for most of them, the play ended. It might be the best First Act ever written, but there, for me, the play began. For me the play was based upon Theme, for the audience upon Character; and the result seemed to be just a Story which had petered out.
The Finborough website contains brief but uniformly positive quotes from reviews of that first production. Even if they were carefully chosen for promotional purposes so many of them seem to be general summations of the play that it's difficult not to wonder why Milne felt the need to revisit the matter so long afterwards. Anne Thwaite's highly recommended biography of Milne says that Blayds ran for a "decent" 124 performances and did indeed get some very good reviews despite some reservations; she even states that a later production by Liverpool Rep "earned Milne the best review (in the Manchester Guardian from C.E. Montague) that he said he had ever had in his life".
So why the need to dwell upon critical reactions in his autobiography? The answer is that Milne seems to have been easily stung by anything other than unstinting praise. W.A. Darlington, theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, was a neighbour and close friend; any negativity he expressed in a review tended to lead to a period of icy relations only the combined efforts of their wives could thaw.
This reminds me of a story about Noel Coward's response in similar circumstances. Ken Tynan had written a less than enthusiastic review of a late Coward play. Walking into the Ivy the next day, Tynan caught sight of his victim seated at a table. There was an awkward pause. Then Coward said (and here you must imagine the clipped voice): "Kenneth Tynan, you are a ****. Now come and sit down." And, that little professional unpleasantness acknowledged and defused, one presumes the two had a lovely time.
Frank Swinnerton, another friend of Milne's, wrote a warm assessment of his work and character in the book The Georgian Literary Scene, but had reservations about Blayds and another play upon which Milne's hopes had once been pinned, Success:
... both plays have the weakness which it seems to me is apparent in Milne’s work whenever he is most serious; that is, they suffer from a kind of punitive zeal against wrongdoing. Milne has such a contempt for backsliders and materialists and sycophants that he cannot withhold a moral foreclosure which affects the structure of his play. [J.M.] Barrie, after seeing The Truth about Blayds (the first play by Milne, I believe, of which he had not read the typescript), is said to have remarked, with a wise theatre man’s laconism, ‘I should have kept the old man alive’; and this comment, by whomsoever it was made, is really, as one thinks of it, devastating. It is much more than a technical criticism. It goes to the root of the whole question. For Blayds, which might have been a great comedy about an impostor, shifts its centre to the impostor’s dependants, ignominious indeed, but of no significance. To castigate the meanness and hypocrisy of those who, after an earthquake. are trying to pretend that there has been a shower, is to bully the demoralized.
It's quite a while since I read Blayds so I'm not sure how far I endorse that idea. But the possibility that Barrie might have made the observation which Swinnerton quotes must have stung Milne: it meant that even the writer whom he admired above all others hadn't got the point of the piece. Swinnerton's book was published in 1938, a year before It's Too Late Now, so it's possible that Milne's lengthy discussion of Blayds was, in part, a response to the freshness of Swinnerton's comments. The title of Milne's book is certainly intended as a riposte to past comments of critics, as he makes clear in the introduction:
... heredity and environment make the child, and the child makes the man, and the man makes the writer; so that it is too late now — it was probably too late forty years ago — for me to be a different writer. I say this neither regretfully nor complacently, I state it as a fact.
So there. Which ties in with an observation he made elsewhere that a writer cannot wish to have written a work by someone else without, in effect, wishing for the other's life ... though he did make an exception in the case of The Importance of Being Earnest, a comedy he considered to be a purely technical achievement.
Moving to a more personal note, while I greatly enjoy Milne's work in general I am particularly excited at the prospect of seeing this play brought back to life at the Finborough. Almost forty years ago, in dominie mode, I directed an excerpt from Blayds as part of an entertainment I'd compiled about Milne's work. Its one and only performance went down like a bear-bearing balloon shot by C.R. Milne, though I can't blame the young cast; even with a bit of narration to set it up, the scene didn't really work in isolation. And I was, let it be said, no kind of director.
I wonder, however, why Blayds, in particular, has been chosen by the Finborough for revival rather than one of Milne's lighter, more characteristic, works. The Dover Road, probably his best-known play for an adult audience, was staged in 2016 at the Jermyn Street Theatre, so maybe that was out of the reckoning. That said, it may be that Blayds will prove a more canny choice than some lighter piece as Milne's sense of its having been misunderstood makes for an interesting story with which to publicise this revival: will modern audiences be more likely to appreciate the playwright's intentions? The Finborough certainly seems to think so, calling it "A play for our times."
I also
suspect (though I am, as I say, no kind of director) that reviving one
of Milne's lighter works might well have involved more pitfalls than the staging of a play
like Blayds. Milne often praised the actors involved in the first
productions of his plays, who evidently understood how to play his
characters, as the same actors were used frequently. His plays may often be gossamer-light but Irene Vanbrugh, who played many roles
for Milne (including in Blayds), said in her autobiography something to the effect that
although his characters might be behind a gauze veil she always felt as though they
could tear through it if they wished. In other words, for all the bright
talk there was the suggestion, at least, of real emotions underneath, not simply bright characters saying bright and amusing things.
I think (though, as before, I am etc etc) that Milne's more comic plays might be harder to coax back to life because modern actors, less familiar with this style of playing, could
find it more difficult to maintain that subtle balance between surface
comedy and a sense of underlying seriousness. Milne's plays rarely have the cynical edge which a
modern audience might expect, though they aren't set in the make-believe
world of his contemporary, P.G. Wodehouse, either, and while some may have farcical elements they don't have the heartlessness of farce, where we enjoy watching the puppets being put through their paces.
A few years ago I
saw a Rattigan comedy in London and had to leave during the interval; it
seemed to me that the actors were at a distance, regarding their
characters with - not necessarily with contempt but unable to inhabit
them convincingly - as far as I was concerned, anyway.
If the exhumed Blayds is a success maybe it will encourage the Finborough or other theatres to take a chance on less sober Milne plays as well; however well or badly staged I would
welcome the chance to see some of the plays I only know on the page.
The other play Frank Swinnerton considered compromised by its author's "punitive zeal", Success, is another comparatively serious one, though audiences hadn't really taken to it: a story of two brothers, "it ran for six weeks to little money", and while memory suggests it was flawed it would certainly be interesting to see revived. Milne said:
it infuriated the critics; BUT I have never had a play so praised by other dramatists and by actors and actresses. And it is certainly the best I have written.
It would also be fascinating to see yet another work which Milne also regarded highly, a dark mixture of Shakespeare and fairytale entitled The Ivory Door. It too was not a great success, so far as I remember, but appealed to at least one person of historical note: it was Joe Orton's RADA audition piece.
See also The sharpest blades: C.S. Calverley and A.A. Milne
Postscript:
Having read some more extracts from reviews of Blayds, and Stark Young's particularly vicious assessment in the New Republic of the Broadway production in full, it's easier to understand Milne's need to return to the subject in his memoir. Yes, there were some rave reviews but it's as Milne says: usually the first act was praised but not keeping the Great Man around for the whole play was generally seen as a mistake, another reviewer of the New York version, Robert Allerton Parker, going so far as to accuse Milne of
forgetting his duty to himself as a dramatist: that stern, unavoidable task of carrying his thought to a beautiful fruition
- which I suppose might have the implication been behind Barrie's milder remark.
Stark Young's piece is interesting, for all its unkindness, however, because he doesn't say Blayds ought to have been kept alive and enjoyed the second act - in part, anyway:
What a comedy now of evasion, people believing what they want to believe; inexhaustible stores of humor for Mr. Milne, and filled by his with delicious turns and crochets.His issue is with a romance between two of the characters which leads to
several hundred words ... in the second act ... that make us squirm for sheer embarrassment .... In the last act it gets worse, for then everything has to be settled, love needs the whole floor ... it illustrates the kind of sentimental drivel that thrives in Great Britain!
He's only revving up, believe me, but I'll spare you the rest. This appears to be the same complaint expressed more tactfully by Thomas Burnett Swann in his book about Milne, though he merely refers to the intrusion of "a superfluous subplot" before reassuring us that
he is always convincing with his immediate materials, the deception and its consequences.
Swann concludes:
The Truth About Blayds is a play which, rarely less than good, disappoints only because it is not more often excellent.
As I say, I haven't reread Blayds for quite some time. I should also say that from reading these further extracts it's clear that there is more comedy in Blayds than I had remembered.
I am even more curious now to see how the director and actors will handle the sections which got Stark Young so het up. Will there be judicious editing? At the time of this update younger people are being offered discounted tickets for the first week. Whatever will they make of it? But, having subjected this piece to frequent tweakings since first posting, I think I must call a halt and say no more until I have seen the play.
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