I was very excited to learn today that A.A. Milne's The Truth About Blayds will be staged at the Finborough Theatre in London in September. Milne's plays are rarely revived, and this one was not a success on its first outing, so the chance to see a professional production is not one to be missed for those who are curious about his work.
The cast includes William Gaunt, playing - or so I imagine - the Blayds of the title, a supposedly great poet who is revealed, after his death, to have been a fraud. Gaunt has played King Lear as well as Arthur Crabtree of sitcom fame so ought to have the necessary gravitas. (This information isn't the spoiler it might seem as the revelation happens early on.)
Milne had quite a run of theatrical successes both in Britain and America but Blayds, more serious in tone than most, was not among them, and it rankled: Milne dwelt on the commercial failure of this piece in his autobiography, his disappointment still keenly felt almost twenty years after the event. The man of letters is killed off after the first act and the play's focus shifts to how the survivors react, but the playing of the Blayds actor had been so striking that audiences and critics alike felt cheated.
Frank Swinnerton, a friend of Milne's, discussing Blayds and another work later, considered that:
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 a while since I have read Blayds and I'm not sure how far I endorse that idea. But for Barrie to have made the observation Swinnerton quotes must have stung: it meant that even he, the writer Milne admired above all others, was blind to his intentions.
I greatly enjoy Milne's plays but there is a particular reason why I am so keen to see this one brought to life again. In dominie mode, many years ago, I directed an excerpt from Blayds within an entertainment about Milne's work beyond the Hundred Acre Wood. It went down like a lead balloon, though I don't blame the young cast; even with a bit of narration to set it up, the scene didn't really work in isolation.
I'm interested to know why Blayds, in particular, has been chosen for revival rather than one of the lighter, more characteristic, works. The Dover Road, probably his best-known play for an adult audience, was staged in 2016, though I wasn't aware of it, so maybe it was out of the reckoning. And Blayds may well prove a canny choice as both its lack of initial success and Milne's marked fondness for it makes an interesting story: will a modern audience appreciate the author's intentions? You decide.
Obviously I can't speak for that revival of The Dover Road but I suspect that reviving Milne's lighter work might prove to have more pitfalls than a play like Blayds. Milne often praised the actors involved in the first productions of his plays; they evidently understood how to play his characters as many were used more than once. His plays, or most of them, may be gossamer-light but Irene Vanbrugh, who played many roles for Milne, said in her autobiography something to the effect that the characters might be behind a gauze veil but she felt that they could tear through it if they wished. In other words, for all the bright talk there were real emotions underneath.
I suspect that the lighter, more comic plays might be harder to coax back to life because not all actors might be able to maintain that balance between surface comedy and a sense of underlying seriousness. Milne's plays rarely have the cynical edge which a modern audience might expect but they are not wholly in the make-believe world of his contemporary, P.G. Wodehouse.
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 certainly unable to inhabit them without convincingly - for me, anyway.
But who knows? If Blayds is a success this time around maybe it will encourage the Finborough, or other theatres, to try less sober Milne plays. The other play Frank Swinnerton was talking about, Success, compared two brothers and would be interesting to see; it was another which audiences hadn't really taken to. And it would be fascinating to see yet another play which Milne regarded highly, a mixture of Shakespear and fairytale entitled The Ivory Door. It too was not a success, so far as I remember, but it evidently appealed to at least one person - it was Joe Orton's RADA audition piece.
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