I’ve got to finally hand it to Nicholas de Jongh. Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve had regular reason to comment on the Evening Standard’s chief theatre critic’s behaviour in the stalls and in print (when he outrageously, in my opinion, wrote about “a very few inches of adolescent male flesh” in reviewing Daniel Radcliffe’s nude appearance in Equus). But now that he’s premiered his own first full-length play, Plague Over England, at the Finborough, not only does it have a high degree of self-revelation (one of the leading characters is a critic, who tells us of his life’s calling that it is an attempt to “avoid the cold douche of reality”), but also has him cheekily referring to his own paper, the Evening Standard, as a “nasty little gossip sheet”. (I wonder how Nick’s editor, Veronica Wadley, took that line in when she attended the press night last Friday). And Nick, whom I have regularly seen “resting his eyes” in he stalls, even has the theatre critic losing his job when he falls asleep in the stalls and snoozes once too often.
But his play kept me wide-awake last night, even though I had (not so freshly) arrived off a flight from San Francisco at lunchtime yesterday.
I should have been at the opening of Major Barbara last night, of course, but since – as that great quote from Privates on Parade has it – “that Bernadette Shaw is such a chatter box”, I thought I’d re-introduce myself to London theatre by going to the Finborough instead which I missed last Friday, and schedule the Shaw for this afternoon – thus making an informal double-bill of plays by critics-turned-playwrights.
I was actually surprisingly fresh, given the good luck of being able to enjoy a Virgin flatbed on the way home – no, I wasn’t in business class, but had four seats all to myself in economy, so was able to sleep lying flat. Even if I had not been quite so together, the crushed intimacy of the Finborough’s five-to-a-row bench seating and the close proximity of the actors may have been enough to keep me alert, too. However, it turned out that both the play and production were worth staying awake for.
The play turned out to be a seriously affecting and affectionate portrait of both one actor’s real-life personal crisis – John Gielgud’s arrest for cottaging in 1953 – but that uses this as a clever platform to look at the emerging personal freedoms that followed in the next twenty years, when Gielgud was able to play a gay man onstage in the premiere of Pinter’s No Man’s Land — even if co-star Ralph Richardson was supposedly so disbelieving of the idea that anyone would put a male member in their mouth that he thought it was a fantasy and couldn’t happen in real life.
As the play fluidly moves from real-life characters and events to merge them with well-realised fictional ones, it is also both frequently deliciously funny and ultimately very moving. (I actually shed tears in the final scene). Though possibly a little too episodic – it felt at times more like a screenplay than a play – director Tamara Harvey marshals the action with finesse, keeping it moving in other ways, too, on this tiny stage with Alex Marker’s resourcefully-designed set making scene changes as adept as possible. It is also a real fringe treat to find such a large and accomplished cast, led by Jasper Britton’s Gielgud and with Nichola McAuliffe offering a scene-stealing double act of contrasts in Dame Sybil Thorndike and private club landlady Vera Dromgoole (lovely name, by the way: wonder where Nick got that one from?). But the two pairs of lovers in the play – Robin Whiting’s 19-year-old “posh boy” gay student and Leon Ockenden’s 25-year-old pretty policeman who arrests Gielgud, and Timothy Watson and Steve Hansell as a pair of older gay men – ground the play in real feeling.
It may be that the play – whose entire run has now sold out in the tiny Finborough – has had a disproportionate amount of media coverage (which I’m adding to now), with a self-penned double-page preview feature by de Jongh in his own paper, and interviews with de Jongh in both The Guardian and Independent, as well as on BBC London television news. But beyond the inevitable fascination of watching a critic becoming a practitioner, I have to say that he’s pulled it off. Perhaps a serious alternative career now awaits him.
Perhaps the praise for DeJongh is really a self-serving conspiracy by the critical community to give him an alternative career somewhere else (screenwriting? ) and encourage him to pursue it immediately .