I saw the Finborough production of The Truth About Blayds last night and enjoyed it a great deal: very well cast, with William Gaunt, as the Great Man, particularly memorable during his time onstage in the first act. If you are considering going to see it, do so is my advice; it serves Milne very well.
Even if Gaunt's compelling performance did make it easier to understand why, as discussed in an earlier post, some critics - and even Milne's idol J.M. Barrie - wished that he had kept Blayds alive for the duration. But, for better or worse, that's not the play he was interested in writing: his intention being to explore "What happens in a religious community when its god is discovered to be a false god?" 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 feel, as Frank Swinnerton did, that the survivors of such a calamity are a bit of 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 the humour out of the way in which the poet's son-in-law, keeper of the flame, scrambles around for a face-saving (and job-saving) solution. The play is best understood as a comedy, in fact, despite the seriousness of its theme. View it as a straight drama and we could complain that such characters as the son-in-law have no redeeming features: straightforwardly "bad" or simply stupid, they are more than happy to deceive themselves and others rather than confront an unpalatable truth. View Blayds principally as a comedy or satire, however, as it becomes less of a problem. The same could be said of a rather convenient get-out for the family at the end.
Watching the play makes it clear how well-crafted it is - or do I mean schematic? At any rate, I suspect that answers to all the potential questions in the audience's mind had been carefully worked out before Milne penned a line of dialogue and that the actual writing was speedily done. I certainly got the impression that speaking the lines came easily to the actors. In his early Punch days (he was assistant editor before the Great War) he wrote his pieces at the very last moment, just before the magazine was going to press, and invention would flow. W.A. Darlington called the dialogue in another Milne play "so beautifully turned that it almost speaks itself", and the dialogue in Blayds is never less than engaging.
Well, almost never, according to some. A number of critics of the original West End and Broadway productions took issue with the romantic subplot which rears up after Blayds' death, the most savage of them being Stark Young in The New Republic, who 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 this love stuff might be handled in the Finborough production.
The director's solution was to confront this potential pitfall head-on by gradually changing the lighting and bringing up dramatic music as Isobel, the daughter of the poet who has devoted her self to nursing him at the expense of her own happiness, laments what might have been. The effect is that we are momentarily in Isobel's head, experiencing her emotions with her, rather than wondering about the naturalism or otherwise of the lines.
There is ultimately a happy ending for Isobel in the final act, with some lines which verge on the cringe-making, but as her suitor, who speaks them, has earnt our trust by this point they can more or less be nodded through. Stark Young's comment that "love needs the whole floor" in Act Three is misleading as most of the act is 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 Shavian characters (Milne was a Shaw fan). Over the course of the play our sympathies will 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.
Links:
The Truth About Blayds runs until 4th October; visit the Finborough website, here, for more details.
Photograph of William Gaunt by Carla Joy Evans; see more here.
My earlier post about the play can be found here.
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