A.A. Milne's The Truth About Blayds to be revived
When I wrote about this play's imminent revival a few weeks ago (see link above) I wasn't quite sure what to expect. Would there be the appropriate balance of seriousness and comedy in the playing? Would contemporary theatregoers take this example of Milne's adult work to their hearts as readily as the audiences a hundred years ago, weaned on his pieces in Punch magazine? The answers, based on the performance I saw last night, would appear to be yes and yes. It is very well cast, with William Gaunt, as the Great Man, particularly memorable during his brief time onstage in the first act. It serves Milne very well, and the time seemed to whizz by, which is always a good sign.
Gaunt's compelling performance did make it easier to understand why, as discussed in that earlier post, some critics - and even Milne's idol J.M. Barrie - wished that he had kept Blayds alive for the duration. But that's not the play he was interested in writing: his intention was to explore "What happens in a religious community when its god is discovered to be a false god?" so having the discredited hero hanging around would have been an irrelevance.
One consequence of a well-acted production, however, is that the intrinsic limitations of a play can become apparent, and it's possible to argue, as Frank Swinnerton did, that the survivors of such a calamity are an easy target:
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.
But there's no doubt that Milne manages to wring a great deal of humour out of the efforts of the poet's son-in-law, keeper of the flame, to find a face-saving solution to the dilemma. The play is best understood as a comedy, in fact, despite the essential seriousness of its theme. View it as a straight drama in the Galsworthy mode and we might complain that a character like the son-in-law is rather one-dimensional, more than happy to deceive himself and others to preserve his little dreamworld; take Blayds as a comedy or satire, however, and the thought of caricature becomes less of a problem. The same could also be said of a rather convenient get-out for the family at the end - but then the suprise appearances of letters have been staples of the plotting of well-made plays since Victorian times.
Watching the play makes it especially clear how well-crafted and satisfying it is from a structural point of vew: by the end, all possible questions in the audience's mind about Blayds' deception have been addressed, and along the way we have enjoyed the light and witty dialogue which had long endeared Milne to audiences by the time Blayds was first produced. It stems from the writing style he had perfected in the aforementioned Punch (he had been assistant editor before the Great War), writing his pieces at the very last moment, just before the magazine was going to press, whereupon invention would flow.
I don't know how Milne wrote his plays but I suspect, in the case of Blayds, that once his theme and all the possible consequences had been thoroughly worked out the writing itself came rapidly. W.A. Darlington called the dialogue in another, lesser, Milne play, Sarah Simple, "so beautifully turned that it almost speaks itself", but that didn't have much of a plot to speak of, whereas Blayds has the twin strengths of a firm backbone plus dialogue which is never less than engaging.
Well, almost never - according to some. There were critics of the original West End and Broadway productions who took issue with a romantic subplot, the most savage of them being Stark Young in The New Republic. He enjoyed all the attendant exposing of hypocrisy but complained of "several hundred words ... in the second act ... that make us squirm for sheer embarrassment ...", so I was particularly interested to see how all this love stuff might be handled in the Finborough production.
Actually, rereading the script today, there doesn't seem all that much to feel embarrassed about. In Act Two Blayds' daughter Isobel, who threw away a chance of personal happiness in order to nurse her father, laments to her former suitor about what might have been, and the odd cloying detail does creep in. But at the end of the act, when she is provoked by her brother-in-law's self-pity - his occupation's gone if Blayds is a fraud - to share her sense of loss and waste with her family it's pretty powerfully done, bolstered by the director's almost daring us not to take it seriously by gradually changing the lighting and bringing up dramatic music; the effect is that we are momentarily in Isobel's head, experiencing her emotions with her, rather than being distracted about the naturalism or otherwise of the lines. This is also true to Milne's stage directions:
Isobel looks in front of her, seeing nothing which they can see.
There is ultimately a happy ending for Isobel in the final act, with some lines which perhaps verge on the cringe-making, but as her suitor, Royce, who speaks them, has thoroughly established his integrity by this point they can more or less be nodded through.
The script as played at the Finborough has some very minor trims - usually only a line or two - but in Isobel and Royce's last conversation alone in Act Three there is a slightly more substantial cut. At first I thought it might have been to avoid a bit of Barriesque or Punch-style whimsy: in the script as published, Isobel invites her suitor to play-act proposing to her mother rather than herself (the child whom Isobel felt herself to be in more hopeful times being long "dead", if you follow). On reflection, however, it seems more likely that as the ages of the two actors involved don't appear to fit with the characters as described by Milne it was deemed wiser to cut the passage. And you could argue that the actors' being somewhat older adds a greater poignancy to this second chance of a life together.
Nothing of any real substance, then, has been removed for this production (unless you are minded to count a passing reference to the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, possibly not quite such a hot potato these days). And assuming that the Chatto & Windus edition of the play faithfully reflects the script as acted on Broadway Stark Young's sneering comment that "love needs the whole floor" in Act Three is misleading: most of the act consists of the sorting out of the legal and moral mess into which Blayds' confession has plunged the family.
Mention should also be made of the actors playing the grandson and granddaughter: they are smart and irreverent, like the pair in You Never Can Tell (Milne "thought well of Mr Shaw"). Over the course of the play our sympathies shift towards the one who proves to be morally superior, but - unlike the cut-and-dried characterisation of the son-in-law - this is a gradual process. I did wonder at times whether some of the grandson's lines in the first act might have been more casually thrown away, but I'm not sure whether this is correct. Maybe a Shavian-style play needs precision throughout.
There was a suspicion, too, at least on the night I saw it, that William Gaunt was occasionally reliant on Catherine Cusack, as his daughter-cum-nurse, for the odd prompt, but as this seemed in character - an old man momentarily forgetting just where he was in another oft-told anecdote - it would only be apparent to saddoes following with the script afterwards, a thing we never do. Possibly it was a decision of the director's, anyway, and either way there's no doubt that Gaunt's performance was rivetting: a man struggling for the right words when everyone around him is fully in control of theirs, especially the self-serving son-in-law carefully weighing every pronouncement with an eye on posterity.
In short, despite the above nitpickery, this revival has been done as well as one could reasonably hope - and it seems to be selling well, so if you are interested please bear in mind that there are only three weeks to go. I missed the production of Milne's The Dover Road at the Jermyn Street Theatre a few years ago, but if The Truth About Blayds is the success it deserves to be then there are certainly other Milne plays worth staging.
At the time of writing a joint biography of Milne and his collaborator on the Pooh books, E.H. Shepard, has just been published, and there is a forthcoming book by Gyles Brandeth described as "a biography of A.A. Milne and Winnie the Pooh", to be published before the end of the month. I shall report on these shortly, though I wonder whether there can be much new material for those who have read Anne Thwaite's biography of Milne. Christopher Milne's own The Enchanted Places is an excellent read. And Shepard wrote his own, abundantly illustrated, memoirs.
Links:
The Truth About Blayds runs until 4th October; visit the Finborough website, here, for more details.
Photographs of William Gaunt as Blayds and Rupert Wickham and Catherine Cusack as Royce and Isobel by Carla Joy Evans; see more here.
My earlier post about the play can be found here.
A.A. Milne Part 1 (Goodbye Christopher Robin)
A.A. Milne Part 2 (Goodbye Christopher Robin)
A.A. Milne Part 3 (Lovers in London)
A.A. Milne Part 4 (Sarah Simple)
Radio play about E.H. Shepard and Christopher Milne
More radio plays
A.A. Milne and Brian Jones: a doomed venture
