THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK. To 27 August.

London

THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK
by T S Eliot.

Finborough Theatre Finborough Pub 118 Finborough Road SW10 9ED To 27 August 2007.
Sun, Mon 8pm.
Runs 2hr 35min Two intervals.

TICKETS: 0870 4000 838 (24hr no booking fee)
www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk (reduced full-price tickets online)
Review: Timothy Ramsden 13 August

Be warned - the theatre’s stifling in hot weather, but this is a rare opportunity to see a flawed drama by a major 20th-century writer.
Just when T S Eliot, a naturalised British citizen, could have been drawing his pension he wrote this play, another of his adaptations of classical Greek drama to English life. Eliot makes a rich business-man his hero, though despite Sir Claude Mulhammer having two confidential clerks there’s little sense of business being done.

Having twice successfully used a contemporary social surface as cloak for classically-rooted plays of ideas, Eliot’s adoption of Euripides’ happy-end tragedy Ion as a model comes unstuck. Without the mythic background Euripides could call upon, this becomes a silly story of paternity, involving children farmed-out after birth, such cause as is given being merely a face-saving sense of shame among the wealthy.

But, unlike Shaw’s Too True To Be Good where Act One concludes by saying the story’s over and the characters will spend two more acts discussing it, this is two acts of discussion preparing for last-act revelations that are distinctly underwhelming.

Yet the story is a mere building-block for Eliot to explore the sense of realities lying beyond appearance and convenience, and the urge to compromise. It’s not only over inconvenient births that faces need to be saved.

A sense of living in two worlds, of artists avoiding being second-rate by consigning themselves to the material world of business, might well occur to the author of The Waste Land after a decade in banking and several more in publishing, though an early form of feng-shui plus references to Eastern mysticism come over more as middle-class dottiness than anything deeper.

Tom Littler’s Finborough production for Primavera faces its own difficulties, playing on a tiny stage, using the basic design for another production, and having to substitute a new actor in a significant role at a late stage.

Yet it’s crisply played, especially on the realistic social level, and there’s an excitement in Eliot’s sense of What Is and What Might Be, played out in different ways in various characters. Just as Eliot makes clear there’s more to life than appears, the Finborough, once again, makes it evident there’s more to British drama than most theatres show.

Sir Claude Mulhammer: Martin Bishop.
Eggerson: David Barnaby.
Colby Simpkins: Anthony Wilks.
B Kaghan: Freddie Huntington.
Lucasta Angel: Antonina Lewis.
Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer: Tamara Ustinov.
Mrs Guzzard: Judy Norman.

Director: Tom Littler
Designer: Pip Swindall.
Lighting: Christopher Nairne.

2007-08-14 12:16:12