The Judas Kiss, Richmond Theatre, October 2012

This David Hare play focuses on two moments in Oscar Wilde’s relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie). One is at the Cadogan Hotel during the day leading up to his arrest, the other in Naples after his release from prison.

Bosie, Robbie, Wilde

The audience found several of Wilde’s lines amusingly witty, and some of Bosie’s breathtakingly narcissistic. This obnoxious young man was well portrayed by Freddie Fox, his admirable physique well befitting the nude scenes, though Tom Colley as Bosie’s Italian lover in Naples arguably beat him in this respect. Cal MacAninch as Robbie Ross, an ex-lover of Wilde who adores him and wants to help him, was very convincing, and the scene with the hotel servants was well played, but Rupert Everett made an unsympathetic Wilde. It’s essential to feel for him, otherwise the play rather loses its point.

Everett as Wilde

In an interview in the programme, David Hare is asked why he picked the two moments he did, and to what extent the dialogue was Hare’s own invention — the answer is most of it. Among numerous other questions and answers, the one asking what the author was trying to achieve is absent: was the intention to explain Wilde’s demise, was it to grieve over a relationship that halted Wilde’s creative genius, or was there some other purpose? However, in an article by Wilde’s only grandson — well worth the price of the programme — Merlin Holland wishes he could ask his grandfather one single question, ’Why on earth did you do it?’ suing Bosie’s father, landing himself in gaol and allowing society to rid itself of a rebel “who called into question … the hypocrisy of those social, sexual and literary values upon which Victorian society was so firmly based”.

The creative team that put this on has done a terrific job. Fine direction by Neil Armfield with excellent designs and costumes by Dale Ferguson and Sue Blaine, and clever lighting by Rick Fisher that allows the audience to experience the passing of many hours as Wilde sits almost immobilised.

Bosie and lover

Time waits for no man, but at the end of this play it seems that Wilde is waiting for time so it can annihilate him. I would have preferred more depth.

Performances at Richmond continue until November 3 — for details click here — after which it goes to the Theatre Royal Brighton, November 5–10, before opening in the West End at the Duke of York’s Theatre on 17 January 2013 (previews from 9 January).

South Downs/ The Browning Version, Harold Pinter Theatre, London’s West End, May 2012

Terence Rattigan’s excellent short play The Browning Version is set in a boys’ boarding school, and for the first half of the evening a new play by David Hare, commissioned the Rattigan estate, has a similar setting.

The Browning Version is about one of the masters, and Hare’s counterpoint focusses on one of the boys. In both plays an act of kindness is the fulcrum lifting the main protagonist out of the tramlines of his sad, yet very scholarly, existence.

Alex Lawther as the clever boy, all images Johan Persson

In Hare’s South Downs a pedantic English master, beautifully played by Andrew Woodall, extols the genius of Alexander Pope, saying “only within a cage do we find freedom”. Indeed a firm foundation and attention to detail provides a basis for true creativity, something that began going awry in the 70s after Hare left school. We still suffer the consequences, and although intellectual rigour is now making a comeback, it has a long way to go.

Tea and cake for Blakemore

Yet here in class is a very clever boy, Blakemore, brilliantly played by young Alex Lawther, who challenges the master in order to protect a boy he wants as his friend. Blakemore is disturbed, but finds it impossible to talk to his housemaster, Rev Eric Dewley, a man of the Church of England who believes in consubstantiation rather than trans-substantiation, but isn’t really sure about that. It’s a clever play, with Dewley very well portrayed by Nicholas Farrell, himself the focus of Rattigan’s play in the second half of the evening. Something needs to happen to Blakemore, and Anna Chancellor as the actress mother of one of the prefects gives him tea and sympathy, faulting him for being unable to dissemble. This is something Rattigan himself was extremely good at when he was at school at Harrow, yet in the end Blakemore manages a transformation, and we move on to Rattigan’s play.

The term Browning Version refers to a translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon by Robert Browning, and the dry-as-dust Classics master, Crocker-Harris is a brilliant scholar who is teaching the boys to read it, in the original of course. This is pretty tough stuff. Yet it’s not the boys who are suffering, but Crocker-Harris himself, superbly portrayed by Nicholas Farrell. He is recovering from a heart attack caused by the chronic stress of an apparently charming but deceptive wife who hates him, a headmaster who is happy to see the back of him, and his own despair at casting scholarly pearls before swine.

Nicholas Farrell as Crocker-Harris in The Browning Version

He’s on track to leave the school — without even a pension — and go to work at a crammer. Could anything be more absurd? Here is a man who should be teaching classical texts at university level, yet to the lower fifth he’s simply the Crock, a beast to beware of. Oh, he understands his position all right. A ‘hen-pecked husband’ to an ‘unsatisfied wife’, the butt of contempt or fear by others. But what can he do about it?

Anna Chancellor as the wife

“Rules are rules” he responds when the disturbingly disappointing news comes down from the trustees about his pension. The pompous fraud of a headmaster, played with carefree abandon by Andrew Woodall, almost seems to relish giving him the bad news, coupled with a request that he diminish himself by allowing someone else to speak last at the end of year celebrations. His dry speech with a hyper-scholarly joke or two is all prepared, and he accedes to the headmaster’s proposal.

Yet suddenly an act of kindness by one of the boys turns everything on its head. This is vintage Rattigan, and I was longing to know what his new speech might be — we never do, of course.

But we do know that precision and attention to detail by a clever scholar can work wonders, as long as he can divest himself of the psychological baggage weighing him down. What might Crocker-Harris have achieved with a less spiteful wife? And how much better might this performance have been if Anna Chancellor as the wife had delivered the main line in the play facing the audience rather than stage rear? In this fascinating and moving portrayal of the dry scholar by Nicholas Farrell we find hope that the precision of Greek translation can once again give huge pleasure and revitalise his life.

These two plays together yield a wonderful evening of theatre. Performances continue until July 21 — for details click here.

The Power of Yes, National Theatre, January 2010

In Spring 2009 the National Theatre asked David Hare to write a play about the financial crisis precipitated on 15^th September 2008. That was when the US Government rejected an appeal to rescue Lehmann Brothers in New York, and liquidity between banks collapsed. The result is this play about a writer trying to get to grips with what happened and why. He has meetings with numerous experts and important players, including that magnificent Hungarian guru, George Soros, who tells us how he learned from his father all about the Russian revolution, a lesson he never forgot. Things can go suddenly very badly wrong, defying the self-professed experts, who can’t imagine that the worst-case scenarios will ever happen. This is backed up by another of his interlocutors, David Freud, a government advisor who now works with the Conservative opposition, when he mentions his father leaving Austria in 1938, the year of the Anschluss with Nazi Germany. By contrast many of the bankers were unable to see what was coming because of a lack of historical perspective, and in the case of the Royal Bank of Scotland boss, an acquisitions geek named Fred Goodwin, couldn’t see anything beyond their own aggrandisement.

The powerful people who attract the most contempt are the previous British Chancellor of the Exchequer — now Prime Minister — Gordon Brown, and to a slightly lesser extent the previous Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, with his zeal for Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King also attracts a few negative comments, but otherwise the author’s interlocutors come over as sensible, intelligent people who were caught up in events beyond their control. David Hare has constructed a play that gives the audience a nuanced insight into what happened and why, and it should be required viewing for anyone who thinks it was all simply a question of greed.

Most of the performance took place on an empty stage, with only the occasional chair, and at the end two chairs and a long table, to disturb the clear telling of a story. It worked very well, with a large cast headed by Anthony Calf as the author. He was entirely convincing, as were the other actors, some of whom appeared in different roles. The exits and entrances came fast on one another, giving the story drive and urgency. I liked Bruce Myers as George Soros, and he has the last word in recounting a conversation with Alan Greenspan in Zürich, when he flatly contradicted Greenspan’s airy optimism. Perhaps the man who invented the phrase “irrational exuberance” had a little of it himself.