Chasing neglected plays…

I’ve already mentioned here about my trip to Bury St Edmund’s to see their latest unearthing of a Georgian-era play, He’s Much To Blame (first performed in 1798), but yesterday afternoon I went to a play from an even more recent vintage that has all but disappeared, The Ring of Truth, originally produced at the Savoy Theatre in 1959, by a playwright, Wynyard Browne, who has also been all but forgotten.

It was, of course, the ever-invaluable Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond that is reviving it. As the Orange Tree’s artistic director Sam Walters puts it in a programme note, Browne had the misfortune to be “one of a number of playwrights whose careers and subsequent reputations were overshadowed by the emergence of the Royal Court and its stable of new young playwrights in the mid-50s and by the work of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East.” As he goes on, “The received wisdom is that modern theatre began in 1956 and that everything written before involved titled members of the upper classes coming in through the French windows to have a drink after a strenuous game of tennis. The plays of Rodney Ackland, which the Orange Tree first presented in 1984 and then on five subsequent occasions, give the lie to such theories and does the work of Wynyard Browne.”

It’s not just the playwright’s own first name that locates him in the past - or a character list in his play that includes someone called Ambrosine. It’s also that he dares to put 14 different characters onstage - but it’s also amazing that the Orange Tree dares to do a play that employs 14 actors to put it on.

It’s that kind of resourcefulness that marks them out in a fringe producing class of their own. But if the form and structure of the play is decidedly old-fashioned - it’s all a lot of huffing and puffing about a lost ring for two and a half hours - it’s also entirely delightful, and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. The Orange Tree’s loyal, elderly audience lapped it up, too - though I wished that a trio of women sitting near me who were audibly tutting and gasping at random lines hadn’t lapped it up quite so much. Elsewhere in the round of the Orange Tree, one could regularly take stock of how many other patrons had fallen asleep, but that’s an occupational hazard here, especially on the matinees.

But I also suspect it is entirely a one-off that we’re unlikely to see again. On the other hand, I went straight on from Richmond to the Almeida’s astonishing reclamation of Ödön von Horváth’s Judgment Day, and as I’ve already declared in my Stage review, it “should be a stage classic, in the tradition of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People”. It actually received its British premiere some twenty years ago, when Stephen Daldry directed it at the Old Red Lion in 1989, but has somehow managed to disappear again in the intervening period.

Intriguingly, I have found a 1996 interview online with Daldry’s partner at the time, Ian McNeil, who said, “I didn’t know he was a good director until he did a show called Judgment Day at the Old Red Lion, London. I’d seen how focused and intense he’d been while he was working on it and I’d been jealous of how much time it was taking up. I kept thinking, ‘It’s just a pub show, for God’s sake.’ But then I saw it and was thrilled - it was so big. We’d been living together for months by then and it was bizarre to find that he was really good at what he did.”

I wish I had seen Daldry’s production; but seeing James Macdonald’s one last night convinced me that I was seeing a modern classic, too.