Peter Viney's Blog

Before The Party
By Rodney Ackland
Based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham

A Salisbury Playhouse Production
Directed buy Ryan McBryde
Designed by James Turner

Thursday 11th May 2017, 14.30

CAST

Sherry Baines – Blanche Skinner, mother
Eleanor Bennett – Susan Skinner, youngest daughter
Philip Bretherton – Aubrey Skinner, father
Roberta Kerr – Nanny
Katherine Manners – Kathleen Skinner, unmarried daughter
Basthsheba Piepe – Laura Whittingham (né Skinner)
Matthew Romain – David Marshall

The adaptation by Rodney Ackland dates from 1949, based on Somerset Maugham’s story from 1922. They’re casting the net beyond the Rattigan / Coward axis in search of well-made plays. Maugham gave up playwriting … and I find him somewhat stiff as a playwright. A Maugham short story (his strongest point) with an actor / director / writer doing the play writing was a good combination. According to the programme, Rodney Ackland was up there in popularity with Coward, Rattigan and Priestley in the 1930s, and was described as the English Chekhov. Maybe, but probably “not quite” as popular as the other three. The play is something of a rediscovery with several 21st century airings, notably the Almeida in 2013 with Katherine Parkinson and Michelle Terry.

All credit to Salisbury Playhouse yet again as a producing theatre that can do runs of three weeks, and get audiences in. I don’t know what Poole, Southampton and Winchester are doing wrong, but they can’t get anywhere near Salisbury’s track record or audience appeal, in spite of it being the smallest of the four. Partly it’s choosing very good conventional plays and doing them well with excellent casts, so building a theatre-going habit. My big test on Before The Party is how would you cast this for a new production? Answer: I’d stick with exactly the Salisbury cast.

The flier picture of a stately home is misleading. The Skinner family are rich enough, upper middle class in 1949, with nanny, cook, maid and gardener (much the same domestic set-up as Richmal Crompton’s William books) but belted aristocracy are they not. Aubrey Skinner (the father) is a provincial solicitor whose ambition is to be Conservative candidate in the Luffington, Surrey by-election. They seek respectability. They want to be accepted by Lord Boot, and by The Bishop of Cape Town.

Laura (Bathsheba Piepe) and David Marshall (Matthew Romain)

The action all takes place in Laura’s bedroom. As an innovative move for 1949, the essential French windows are NOT central, but stage left, leading on to a balcony, The room has two other exits, at the rear to the house, and stage right to Kathleen’s room. It has a double bed, and African memorabilia hung on the wall in tribute to Laura’s marriage to a district commissioner in the Gold Coast (Ghana since 1958).

The play is heavily “of 1949” with constant references to food rationing, petrol rationing, Aneurin Bevan, black marketeering. Ackland moved the setting from Maugham’s generic early 20th century to Post World War Two. David Marshall (Laura’s new boyfriend) had fought in Yugoslavia with Marshall Tito’s guerrillas.

Racism is part of the language of the era. The Skinner family are afflicted with an Austrian cook, who supports Oswald Moseley’s fascists, and a “Jewess” as a maid who the Nazi cook has accused of prostituting herself to American forces (neither are seen). Add slurs on the “natives” of the Gold Coast and “the black woman” accused of murder.

We learn that Laura is in a relationship with David Marshall. She was widowed eight months earlier, ostensibly when her plump husband, Harold, twice her age, died of malaria. The family believes she should wear mourning black for a year. She wants to go to the big party at the Canon’s dressed in pink. The big dark secret is “How did Harold really die?” We know that as a civil servant he had needed to get married for respectability.  The big dark secret is alcoholism, a word not used in the play (a drunkard, a dipsomaniac, with delirium tremens), though Maugham uses it. Maugham describes binge alcoholism leading to permanent alcoholism extremely well, and those are some of the few lines Ackland takes almost verbatim. A little reading between the lines is not hard. A respectable marriage to an available female?  Harold has been ordered to get married to preserve his colonial service career? A dark secret?  This is a recurrent theme of early 20th century playwrights, especially Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan. The programme mentions that Ackland was bisexual. An added dimension is added to the Big Dark Secret is revealed to those in 1949 he knew the code: poor Harold died naked in bed except for a towel.

Part of the appeal of he play is that it has five rich female roles, to two male ones. As my companion said, the part you’d want to be cast as is Kathleen, the snobby golfing sister. Kathleen (played here by Katherine Manners) is a marvellous comic creation … jealous, a tell-tale, snobbish, prurient, moralising, finding what she once saw her sister do with “Bruce” when she was eighteen “Disgusting! Disgusting!” Laura is the widow with a secret, and embarking on a romance with David Marshall, shockingly for 1949 two years her junior. Tell that to M. Macron. Laura (Bathsheba Piepe) is more attractive than Kathleen, more independent, feistier. The third sister is Susan, a pre-teen. Eleanor Bennet takes the role and it’s a major part. It left everyone around us saying “How old is she?” because she looks about thirteen and is much shorter than everyone else (and Dad isn’t tall) but takes a large role and makes it convincing and hilarious.

Aubrey (Philip Bretherton) and Susan (Eleanor Bennett) discuss the meaning of Christianity!

Then we have mother, Blanche (Sherry Baines) worried, elegant, even changing her laddered stockings on stage with elegance. Philip Bretherton plays dad, Aubrey Skinner. He plays it large and close to farce with big expressions and reactions, but that felt right, and was extremely funny. Add David Marshall, the new boyfriend (Matthew Romain), and Ackland borrowed a bit of The Importance Of Being Earnest with Who’s Who providing a revelation … OK, it’s the Army Lists in Wilde. What was done with subtlety by Matthew Romain was the slight inebriation building through the play without ever falling into “drunk” but just enough for us to know that he is at the start of the path that led to Harold’s full-on alcoholism. Roberta Kerr is the Nanny, and as with every part in the production, perfectly played.

There are two “Before The Party” acts. In Act One they’re preparing for the snobby garden party. In Act Two, three hours later, they are expecting the Bishop and company for dinner … a dinner party. They inadvertently invited them.

Act Two: L to R: Aubrey (Philip Bretherton, Kathleen (Katherine Manners), David Marshall (Matthew Romain), Blanche (Sherry Baines)

It is “from the short story” by Somerset Maugham, so after I’d seen it I dug out The World Over,  my book club cheap edition of Maugham’s collected stories and read the original. It’s described as a 50 page novella on line, but it’s twenty pages of smallish print in my edition. It’s definitely not a comedy. The play version is 90% Ackland’s. Maugham sketches out just four characters, the father, mother, Kathleen and the widowed daughter. Ackland changed the widow’s name from Millicent to Laura. In Maugham she’s fat, thirty-five with jowls and was married at 27 to Harold, 44. Here she was married at 21, about ten years earlier and is obviously attractive. She now has an unseen son, Jeremy. In Maugham, it was a daughter, Joan. Aubrey in Ackland was Alfred in Maugham (a much better choice by Ackland). The setting in Maugham was Borneo, not West Africa, and Harold was fond of wearing a sarong, which was all he was wearing when he died, rather than a towel. The younger sister Susan, the David Marshall plot line, Nanny, are all Ackland’s creations, as is most of what we learn about Blanche and Aubrey. In fact, all Ackland took from Maugham was the tale that Laura recounts of her loveless marriage to Harold, and Harold’s death. In that section, mostly near the end of Act One, he is taking Maugham almost line by line.  But that’s all that you get in the Maugham short story. A couple of Maugham’s lines about how Aubrey’s solicitor’s firm only takes respectable cases get re-used. It may be that he 1949 attitudes, played as of the era, add considerably to the humour nowadays.

There is much fun with a copy of The News of The World that characters look at. Aubrey rails about the sort of cases that appear in its pages, and made me wonder how well he judge in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial, a dozen years later, knew the play. His lines about Would you allow your wife and servants to read this? are much what Ackland has Aubrey saying in 1949.

It’s a hard play to do. Ackland’s c omic brush is far broader than his contemporaries, and director Ryan McBryde comes to this production after successful Salisbury pantomimes, This production is extremely funny, vivacious and well performed.

MY RATING:

****

MISSING MUSIC CREDITS

You Always Hurt he One You Love by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher is played at some length in the opening scene where Laura tears up a photograph. The lyrics are apposite. Does it not deserve a programme credit? In my ignorance, and knowing Clarence Frogman Henry’s 1961 rocked up hit version, I thought it an anachronism. I was wrong. It was a #1 hit by The Mills Brothers in 1944. Act 2 opens with Blue Skies by Irving Berlin (over a thunderstorm). So deliberately ironic. The song dates from 1926, but again appropriately was recorded in 1946 by both Bing Crosby and by Frank Sinatra.

RODNEY ACKLAND
Absolute Hell, National Theatre 2018

SOMERSET MAUGHAM ON THIS BLOG
The Constant Wife by W. Somerset Maugham, Salisbury Playhouse
For Services Rendered, by W. Somerset Maugham, Chichester Minerva Theatre, 2015

BATHSHEBA PIEPE
Dr Faustus, RSC 2016
Don Quixote, RSC 2016