THE LETTER. To 10 March.
Tour.
THE LETTER
by Somerset Maugham.
Tour to 10 March 2007.
Runs 2hr 15min One interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 27 January at Richmond Theatre.
Drama of a life from far away and long ago.
Somerset Maugham could be a powerful, astringent playwright – see 1932’s For Services Rendered, due for revival in Newbury, with its savage denunciation of post-war English society. The Letter, written 5 years earlier, is more difficult, showing the English with their public face, as colonists in the Malay Peninsula.
Whether or not Maugham doubted the quality of the tiffin-taking classes, these are people clinging to a fixed English identity. Director Alan Strachan uses ethnically diverse actors (a 1956 TV version cast Patrick Cargill as a Chinese), but there’s no disguising the implicit attitudes and the dialogue that demean the non-English characters, nor the stereotyping of the one scene in a non-British habitation, with its opium, claustrophobic hangings and oppressive air.
This is where the Chinese woman who is the plot’s passive agent is both exploited by local racketeers and disregarded by the British presence. With one exception, and that largely through the discreet strength of a performance, the non-English have no interest in their own right.
If Maugham is putting English hypocrisy on display, it emerges only partly. Jenny Seagrove’s Leslie, a planter’s wife, starts the play with a bang. Or several, as she shoots a fellow ex-pat. The question is, why, and how will it be regarded in court? The play puts her on trial without entering the halls of justice, instead showing how doing one’s best by people-like-us, even when they’re not people we like, can taint due process of law.
Anthony Andrews’ lawyer, with an upper-lip so stiff it could put prize-winning starch to shame, shows ethical distaste throughout. But it’s only with the final lines that a deeper kind of punishment takes hold of the killer. Seagrove expresses it with fragrant clarity, yet limited sense of the soul-wrenching double life-sentence her existence will become.
This is a sturdy drama in a rock-solid production. That solidity’s both its strength and limitation. No doubting, though, the sleek force of Jason Chan’s legal clerk, smoothly eliding ambition, knowing his colonial place and silkily-worded employment as a blackmailer’s go-between. When the Empire moves out, he’ll doubtless soon be in charge.
Geoffrey Hammond: Chris McCalphy.
Leslie Crosbie: Jenny Seagrove.
Head Boy: Jamie Zubairi.
Hassan: Andrew Joshi.
John Withers: Peter Sandys-Clarke.
Robert Crosbie: Andrew Charleson.
Howard Joyce: Anthony Andrews.
Ong Chi Seng: Jason Chan.
Mrs Parker: Sioned Jones.
Chung Hi: Jon David Yu.
Chinese Woman: Liz Sutherland.
Dorothy Joyce: Karen Ascoe.
Director: Alan Strachan.
Designer: Paul Farnsworth.
Lighting: Jason Taylor.
Sound: Ian Horrocks-Taylor.
Composer: Catherine Jayes.
Assistant director: Tom Littler.
2007-01-28 13:19:07