When I wrote about this play's imminent revival at the Finborough Theatre a few weeks ago I hoped for the best but wasn't 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 audiences of 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, moreover, Yes. It is well cast, with William Gaunt as the Great Man particularly memorable during his time onstage in the first act. The production serves Milne very well, and time seemed to whizz by, which is always a good sign.Gaunt's performance made it easier to understand why, as discussed in that earlier post, some critics - and even Milne's idol and inspiration, J.M. Barrie - wished that he had kept Blayds alive for the duration. But, as he made clear over six pages of his autobiography, that's not the play he was interested in writing: his intention was to explore the question "What happens in a religious community when its god is discovered to be a false god?" so the discredited hero hanging around would have been an irrelevance.One consequence of a well-acted production such as this is that the intrinsic limitations of a play can become more 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 (and job-saving) solution to the problem and the play is essentially a comedy, despite the seriousness of its theme. View it as a straight drama in the Galsworthy mode and a pompous, self-serving character like the son-in-law could seem rather one-dimensional, all too willing to deceive himself to preserve his little dreamworld; consider Blayds a comedy or satire, however, and the thought of caricature becomes less of a problem. The same could also be said of a convenient get-out for the family at the end - but then the appearance, at the eleventh hour, of some solution-bearing letter has been a staple of the well-made play since Victorian times.
Watching the action unfold onstage makes it especially clear how well-crafted and satisfying Milne's play is structurally: 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 the playwright to audiences by the time Blayds was first produced. It stems from the style he had perfected in the aforementioned Punch - he had been assistant editor before the Great War - writing his own pieces just before the magazine was going to press, whereupon invention would flow; H.F. Ellis (creator of A.J. Wentworth, who first appeared in Punch), hailed Milne's style as an innovation when writing his obituary for the magazine.
I don't know how Milne wrote his plays but suspect that - in the case of Blayds, at least - once the theme and all possible consequences had been thoroughly worked out the writing itself came rapidly. W.A. Darlington called the dialogue in another Milne play, Sarah Simple, "so beautifully turned that it almost speaks itself", but that late work didn't have much of a plot to speak of, whereas Blayds has the twin strengths of a firm narrative backbone and dialogue which is never less than engaging.
Well, almost never - according to some critics who took issue with the romantic subplot. The most savage of them was Stark Young, reviewing the Broadway production in The New Republic: while he appreciated all the comedy Milne was able to wring out of self-deception he complained bitterly of "several hundred words ... that make us squirm for sheer embarrassment ..." in the second act and found even more to complain about in Act Three, so I was particularly interested to see how all this love stuff might be handled in this revival.
As performed at the Finborough, there doesn't actually seem all that much to feel embarrassed about. In Act Two Blayds' daughter Isobel, who threw away her chance of personal happiness in order to nurse her father, laments to her former suitor about what might have been - and yes, perhaps the odd cloying detail does creep in. But when the family are gathered together at the end of the act and she is provoked by her brother-in-law's self-pity to share her more personal sense of loss and waste this is pretty powerfully done, bolstered by the director's almost daring us not to take it seriously: the lighting gradually changes and dramatic music is brought up, making us feel that we are in Isobel's head, experiencing her emotions with her, rather than being distracted about the naturalism or otherwise of the lines. This also seems 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.
Reading the play as published, however, shows that there has been some judicious editing for the current production. This consists mostly of minor trims - the odd line or two - but in Isobel and Royce's last conversation alone in Act Three there is a more substantial edit at the point where Royce proposes to Isobel once again, eighteen years on - precisely where Stark Young was most vicious when reviewing the Broadway production.
Here is the script as published in 1922, with the lines cut for the Finborough production highlighted in bold. Isobel has just agreed with Royce not to expose her late father's fraud to the world after all:
Royce: (Picking up his statement.) Then I can tear up this?
Isobel: (After a little struggle with herself.) Yes! Let us bury the dead, and forget about them.
(He tears it up. She gives a sigh of relief.)
(With a smile.) There!
Royce: (Coming to her.) Isobel!
Isobel: Ah — but she’s dead too. Let’s forget about her.
Royce: She is not dead. I have seen her.
Isobel: When did you see her?
Royce:. To-day I have seen her. She peeped out for a moment, and was gone.
Isobel:. She just peeped out to say good-bye to you.
Royce: (Shaking his head.) No. To say “How do you do” to me.
Isobel: My dear, she died eighteen years ago, that child.
Royce: (Smiling.) Then introduce me to her mother.
Isobel: (Gravely, with a smile behind it.) Mr. Royce, let me introduce you to my mother — thirty-eight, poor dear. (Bowing.) How do you do, Mr. Royce? I have heard my daughter speak of you.
Royce: How do you do, Mrs. Blayds? I’m glad to meet you, because I once asked your daughter to marry me.
Isobel: (Unhappily.) Ah, don’t, don’t!
Royce: (Cheerfully.) Do you know what she said? She said, like all properly brought up girls, “You must ask my mother.” So now I ask her — “Isobel’s mother, will you marry me?”
Isobel: Oh!
Royce: Isobel was quite right. I was too old for her. Look, I’m grey. And then I’ve got a bit of rheumatism about me somewhere — I really want a nurse. Isobel said you were a born nurse ... Isobel’s mother, [Isobel,] will you marry me?
Isobel: It's only because you are sorry for me — because I'm lonely and poor.
Royce: It's very selfish of you, talking like that.
Isobel: Selfish?
Royce: Harping on your loneliness. What about my loneliness?
Isobel: You aren't lonely.
Royce: I shall be if you don't marry me.
Isobel: I’m afraid to. I shall be so jealous.
Royce: Jealous! Of whom?
Isobel: Of that girl we call my daughter. You will always be looking for her. You will think that I shan’t see; you will try to hide it from me; but I shall see. Always you will be looking for her — and I shall see.
Royce: I shall find her.
Isobel:. No, it’s too late now.
Royce: (Confidently.) I shall find her. Not yet, perhaps; but some day. Perhaps it will be on a day in April, when the primroses are out between the wood-stacks, and there is a chatter of rooks in the tall elms. Then, a child again, she will laugh for joy of the clean blue morning, and I shall find her. And when I have found her, I shall say —
Isobel: (Gently.) Yes?
Royce: I shall say, “Thank God, you are so like your mother — whom I love.” ["I love you."]
Isobel: No, no, it can’t be true.
Royce: It is true. (Holding out his hands.) I want you — not her.
Isobel: Oh, my dear!
Stark Young had this to say:
This is the kind of thing ... that teaches us to value the actor's self-control in getting such stuff said and done with. And it illustrates for us the kind of sentimental drivel that thrives in Great Britain! How full of ringlet curls it is, of sashes, and silly affectation! ... No wonder Continentals are puzzled by the London stage, by this willingness to falsify, to slip and slop inanities, to welter in treacle.
Whether or not the cuts were directly inspired by that review my first thought was that they were the director's attempt to forestall any suggestion in reviews of the play being possessed of a Barriesque or Punch-style whimsy: Milne's male characters in his Punch pieces, as well as some plays, do tend to slip and out of play-acting moments like the above at the drop of a hat.
On reflection, however, it may be more likely that as the ages of the two actors involved don't accord with those of the characters as described by Milne, whose Royce is "forty" and Isobel "nearly forty", it was deemed wiser to cut the passage. And you could argue that the actors' being somewhat older adds greater poignancy to this second chance for a life together.
That apart, nothing of any real substance has been removed or altered for this production (unless you are minded to count a passing reference to the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy, rather less of a hot potato these days). Stark Young's comment in his review that "love needs the whole floor" in Act Three is misleading: with or without the excised lines most of the act still consists of the sorting out of the legal and moral mess into which Blayds' deathbed 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 for them shift a little but this is a gradual process, whereas their father's character is established instantly and is unchanging. 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, 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 be apparent only to saddoes following with the script afterwards, which is 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, according to the theatre, 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 Milne-related radio plays
A.A. Milne and Brian Jones
Postscript:
I have now read The Men Who Created Winnie-the-Pooh, James Campbell's joint biography of Milne and E.H. Shepard. It is a handsome volume, illustrated throughout, and the reproductions of Shepard's work are of high quality - not only of the Pooh drawings as published but various studies and sketches, as well as some of Shepard's wartime work (Mr Campbell also wrote the book Shepard's War).
The chapters on Milne draw heavily on Anne Thwaite's comprehensive biography (which, in its turn, quotes liberally from Milne's and his son's autobiographies), so if your particular interest is in Milne there is little here which is new, so far as I can see - but it is, nevertheless, very well written and makes for a particularly clear and readable distillation of Milne's story which might encourage some readers to explore further. (If you do search for a copy of Anne Thwaite's book and are particularly interested in his theatre work be aware that one paperback edition either removed or significantly cut down that material, though I understand that the most recent edition restored it.)
I feel less qualified to discuss the Shepard chapters, not having read his two illustrated volumes of autobiography for many years, but the author does remark that, in Shepard's case, his surviving granddaughter was able to supply stories and grant him access to material; in Milne's case there were no surviving family members. Christopher Milne was still around at the time of Mrs Thwaite's book and gave her a liberating instruction: write the book as though he would never read it.
Gyles Brandreth's book will be published shortly, and I'll add something below when I've read it. He has the advantage of having known Christopher Milne in his later years, but as Milne's son published three volumes of memoirs it will be interesting to see how much will be new.
But of course the above concerns only matter to the reader already familiar with existing biographical material; next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Winnie the Pooh, and any readable and attractive book which reminds the world of that classic work, and the men who created it, as opposed to the Disneyfied version, is to be welcomed. (Mr Campbell mentions that Shepard had no control over how Disney presented his work.)
One more thing to add: I saw The Truth About Blayds again at a packed matinee during the second week of its run and immediately after it was over, in the midst of a general hubbub of satisfaction, I heard a middle-aged woman shout out in surprise at how good it had been; suddenly the possibility of more revivals of Milne plays doesn't seem quite so fanciful.
Too late for Orton's pleasure, but might The Ivory Door be unlocked once again or the promise of Success be put to the test for a second time? Probably not the latter, as that too has a section which might be accounted whimsical and unlike Blayds did not even have a decent run first time out ... but who knows? Given the probable anniversary celebrations next year suddenly Milne could be a hot ticket.
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