Modern British Drama on Screen 9781107703544, 9781107001015

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MODERN BRITISH DRAMA ON SCREEN

This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive treatment of British and American films adapted from modern British plays, providing insights into the mutually profitable relationship between the newest performance medium and the most ancient. With each chapter written by an expert in the field, Modern British Drama on Screen focuses on key playwrights of the period, including George Bernard Shaw, Somerset Maugham, Terence Rattigan, Noël Coward, and John Osborne and on the most significant British drama of the past century from Pygmalion to The Madness of George III. Most chapters are devoted to single plays and the transformations they underwent in the move from stage to screen. Ideally suited for classroom use, this book offers a semester’s worth of introductory material for the study of theater and film in modern Britain, widely acknowledged as a world center of dramatic productions for both stage and screen. r. barton palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Film Studies program. He is the author, editor, or general editor of nearly fifty volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects, and is a leading figure in the field of adaptation studies. Among other publications in this area, Palmer is the editor of two previous volumes for Cambridge University Press: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen (2007) and TwentiethCentury American Fiction on Screen (2007). With William Robert Bray, he is the coeditor of Modern American Drama on Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2013). william robert bray is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is the founding editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and the founding director of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. He is the author of Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2007) and (with R. Barton Palmer) Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (2009). Bray also serves as coeditor (with R. Barton Palmer) of Modern American Drama on Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

MODERN BRITISH DRAMA ON SCREEN edited by R. BARTON PALMER and WILLIAM ROBERT BRAY

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107001015 © Cambridge University Press 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printing in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Modern British drama on screen / edited by R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-107-00101-5 1. Film adaptations – History and criticism. 2. English drama – Film adaptations. 3. American drama – Film adaptations. 4. Film adaptations – History and criticism. 5. Motion pictures and literature – Great Britain. 6. Motion pictures and literature – United States. I. Palmer, R. Barton, editor of compilation. II. Bray, William Robert, 1951– editor of compilation. pn1997.85m63 2013 791.430 6–dc23 2013021432 isbn 978-1-107-00101-5 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

page vii

List of illustrations Notes on contributors

xi 1

Introduction R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray

1

“That filth from which the glamour is not even yet departed”: adapting Journey’s End

12

Lawrence Napper

2

Playful banter in Shaw’s Pygmalion

31

Douglas McFarland

3

Knowing your place: David Lean’s film adaptation of Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed

44

Neil Sinyard

4

62

The Browning Version revisited Marcia Landy

5

Screening for serious people a trivial comedy: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

85

Tom Ryall

6

The British New Wave begins: Richardson’s Look Back in Anger

103

Steve Nicholson

7

The shift from stage to screen: space, performance, and language in The Knack . . . and How to Get It

121

Christine Geraghty

8

See-thru desire and the dream of gay marriage: Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane on stage and screen James Campbell v

145

Contents

vi 9

Sleuth on screen: adapting masculinities

169

Monika Pietrzak-Franger

10 Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect: gender, class, and adaptation anxiety

192

Cynthia Lucia

11

The madness of Susan Traherne: adapting David Hare’s Plenty

216

Tiffany Gilbert

12

“A Tom Stoppard Film”: agency and adaptation in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead

236

Elizabeth Rivlin

13

Rewriting history: Alan Bennett’s collaboration with Nicholas Hytner on the adaptations of The Madness of George III and The History Boys

258

Joseph H. O’Mealy

Filmography Index

279 285

Illustrations

0.1 George Bernard Shaw. page 2 1.1 James Whale, who directed the film version of Journey’s End. 16 1.2 The most important relationship in the film is between Lieutenant Raleigh (David Manners) and Captain Stanhope (Colin Clive), an old friend on the verge of nervous collapse. 16 1.3 When Raleigh is mortally wounded in a trench raid, Stanhope stays with him while he dies, unsure if, now friendless and alone, he can face the inevitable German assault. 25 2.1 Pygmalion briefly evokes working-class life with images of shabby disorder. 36 2.2 Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) and Eliza Doolittle make an ill-assorted couple often captured in two-shots. 38 2.3 Showing off her now proper pronunciation of “h’s,” Eliza is still uncomfortable in “respectable” society. 39 3.1 Noël Coward. 45 3.2 Lean’s camera locates the Gibbons family socially and geographically through a series of aerial shots that eventually zoom into a semi-detached villa in the respectable working-class London neighborhood of Clapham. 47 3.3 Neighbor and war buddy Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway) is here framed by Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) and wife Ethel (Celia Johnson). 53 4.1 The 1994 version emphasizes the emotional drama of the account of Agamemnon by the cuckolded Andrew Crocker-Harris (Albert Finney). 66 vii

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4.2 Mrs. Crocker-Harris (Greta Scacchi) visits erstwhile lover Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine) at his digs in hopes of reigniting their romance in the 1994 version. 4.3 In the 1951 version Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) knuckles under to the insulting demands of the headmaster (Wilfrid Hyde-White). 4.4 An unexpected present from a student prompts an emotional reaction from the hitherto-repressed Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) in the 1951 version. 5.1 Asquith’s film announces its theatricality with a short pre-credit sequence featuring extravagantly dressed theatregoers occupying a private box. 5.2 Jack Worthing (Michael Redgrave) is in love with Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), but their relationship is compromised by John’s double life. 5.3 Algernon (Michael Denison) has it in his power to assure his friend Jack’s romantic happiness, and Jack, as it turns out, holds a similar power over him. 6.1 Jimmy’s most affectionate relationship is with Cliff Lewis (Gary Raymond), who shares his disappointment with the adult world and the British “establishment.” 6.2 Cliff, Jimmy, and the latter’s two love interests, wife Alison (Mary Ure) and inamorata Helena (Claire Bloom), constitute an unstable and conflict-ridden ménage. 6.3 Jimmy (Richard Burton) and Helena (Claire Bloom) have an affair as filled with bitterness and anger as Jimmy’s marriage to Alison. 7.1 Taste evokes the grimness of working-class Liverpool by Walter Lassally’s expert on-location photography. 7.2 The advertising campaign for Taste expresses the youthful vigor and optimism so central to British New Wave production. 7.3 Knack’s witheringly ironic examination of sexual politics begins with shots of the queue of identically dressed women, waiting to be serviced by Tolen (Ray Brooks). 8.1 Mr. Sloane (Peter McEnery) is first spied by Kath (Beryl Reid) sunbathing in the cemetery, and he quickly becomes the object of her intense desire, as the glamour close-up suggests.

67 70 74 90 91 92 112 116 116 126 127 134 146

List of illustrations 8.2 Kath’s brother Ed (Harry Andrews) turns Mr. Sloane into a chauffeur, dressed in bespoke leather, and later into his lover. 8.3 After Mr. Sloane murders Kemp, Kath and Ed blackmail him into constituting a ménage à trois, with the young man becoming a virtual prisoner. 9.1 Laurence Olivier as Andrew Wyke in the 1972 film version of Sleuth. 9.2 Kenneth Branagh’s postmodern version of Sleuth features a multi-mediated look (here a security-camera view of the two antagonists). 9.3 This tightly framed two-shot close-up of Milo (Michael Caine) and Andrew (Laurence Olivier) suggests their uncomfortable closeness, anticipating Andrew’s attempted seduction of his rival. 10.1 Rita (Julie Walters) on her first visit to Frank’s office, dressed in a style and with a manner she will soon eagerly abandon. 10.2 Frank (Michael Caine) is drunk as he begins to lecture, a signal event on his downward slide from professional respectability. 10.3 Rita with her husband and in-laws at the “local” on the night she discovers she has no voice to join in their song. 11.1 Susan (Meryl Streep) meets Lazar (Sam Neill) on an undercover mission in France, the man she then hopelessly yearns after the rest of her life. 11.2 Susan strikes up a friendship with the even more unconventional Alice (Tracey Ullman). 11.3 Her marriage to Brock (Charles Dance) hits a crisis point when he refuses to let her demolish his home and career. 12.1 Stoppard’s drama opens with his two characters framed in a blank wilderness, suggesting their existential dilemma. 12.2 A costume drama of sorts, the film, with its rich interiors, stays true to some of the conventions of the genre. 12.3 Guildenstern (Tim Roth) and Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) are often bewildered by the strange and deadly world of Elsinore. 13.1 French instruction at this Sheffield grammar school includes a good deal of inventive and witty playacting.

ix 147 147 170 171

180 193 196 198 220 223 232 237 240 246 271

x

List of illustrations

13.2 The educational regime changes when a new history teacher, Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), challenges his “A” level charges to reject conventional approaches to the subject. 13.3 The general-studies teacher known as “Hector” (Richard Griffiths), charismatic but flawed, encourages the boys’ creativity.

272 275

Notes on contributors

william robert bray is the founding editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and founding director of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference, an annual event held in conjunction with the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival. He has written over two dozen articles on Williams and is the author of Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2007), coauthor of Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (with R. Barton Palmer, 2009), and coeditor of Modern American Drama on Screen (2013). Bray is a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. james campbell is an associate professor and director of graduate studies in the English Department at the University of Central Florida. His previous articles have appeared in ELH, NLH, and Science Fiction Studies, among others. He is currently working on an extended project on Oscar Wilde. christine geraghty is Emeritus Professor of Film and Television at the University of Glasgow and Honorary Research Fellow, Goldsmiths College, University of London. She has published extensively on film and television with a particular interest in fiction and form. Her publications include British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (2000); My Beautiful Laundrette (2004); Now a Major Motion Picture: Film Adaptations of Literature and Drama (2008), and Bleak House (2012), and she is on the editorial and advisory boards of a number of journals. tiffany gilbert is an associate professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She has previously published articles on Dorothy Dandridge’s performance in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, the Byronic influences in Giuseppe Verdi’s opera, Otello, and on the nexus between desire and nostalgia in James Baldwin’s short story, xi

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Notes on contributors

“Going to Meet the Man.” She has also written on the American Dream at mid century and on Jim Sheridan’s 1989 film, My Left Foot. marcia landy is Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies with a Secondary appointment in the French and Italian Department at the University of Pittsburgh. Her books include Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943 (1986); British Genres: Cinema and Society, 1930–1960 (1991); Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama (1991); Film, Politics, and Gramsci (1994); Queen Christina (with Amy Villarejo, 1995); Cinematic Uses of the Past (1996); The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in Italian Cinema (1998); Italian Film (2000), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media (2000); Stars: The Film Reader (with Lucy Fischer, 2004); Monty Python’s Flying Circus (2005), and Stardom, Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema (2008). cynthia lucia is a professor of English and director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Rider University. She is author of Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film (2005) and is currently completing a study of the filmmaker Patrice Leconte. She is coeditor of The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (2012), a four-volume series, and an editorial board member of Cineaste, in which she has published numerous interviews and reviews. douglas m c farland is a professor of English and Classical Studies at Flagler College. His many publications on film include recent essays on the Coen brothers, John Frankenheimer, and Steven Soderbergh. He is currently editing a collection of essays on the adaptations of John Huston. lawrence napper is a lecturer in the Film Studies Department of King’s College, London. His publications include British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years (2009). steve nicholson is Chair of 20th Century Theatre and Performance and Director of Theatre in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. He has published extensively on the relationship between theatre and politics in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century, as well as on more contemporary writers and texts, and is responsible for a volume on theatre of the 1960s, Modern British Playwriting: The 1960s: Voices, Documents, New Interpretations (2012). He is also the author of a four-part study of the history of theatre censorship in Britain under the Lord Chamberlain between 1900 and

Notes on contributors

xiii

1968; the volume covering the 1950s was short-listed for the Society of Theatre Research Annual Book Prize in 2012, and the final volume, focusing on the 1960s, will be published in 2013. joseph h. o’mealy is a professor of English at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He received his B.A. from Holy Cross and his Ph.D. from Stanford. He is the author of several essays on Charles Dickens and Margaret Oliphant, as well as the book Alan Bennett: A Critical Introduction (2001). r. barton palmer is the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Global Cultural Studies and Cinema and World Cultures undergraduate degree programs. Palmer is the author, editor, or general editor of nearly fifty volumes on various literary and cinematic subjects. For Cambridge University Press he has edited two volumes on film adaptation: Nineteenth-Century American Fiction on Screen and Twentieth-Century American Fiction on Screen (both published in 2007). He wrote Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”: The Relationship between Text and Film (2008) and (with William Robert Bray) Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Adaptation. Palmer is also coeditor (with William Robert Bray) of Modern American Drama on Screen (Cambridge University Press, 2013). monika pietrzak-franger is a lecturer in the English Department at Braunschweig University, Germany. Her books include, as author, The Male Body and Masculinity: Representations of Men in British Visual Culture of the 1990s (2007) and, as (co-)editor, Adaptations: Performing across Media and Genres (2009) and Women, Beauty, and Fashion (2013). She is currently working on her post-doctoral project, which focuses on medicine and visual culture in the late Victorian era, for which she has received funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2012 she was a visiting fellow in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. elizabeth rivlin is an associate professor of English at Clemson University. Her book The Aesthetics of Service in Early Modern England was published in 2012. She has also published articles in English Literary History, English Literary Renaissance, and in the edited collection Working Subjects in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Michelle Dowd and Natasha Korda (2011). She is currently working on a book about American Shakespearean adaptations in the twenty-first century.

xiv

Notes on contributors

tom ryall is Emeritus Professor of Film History at Sheffield Hallam University. His books include Anthony Asquith (2005), Britain and the American Cinema (2001), and Alfred Hitchcock and the British Cinema (1996). He has contributed various articles on British and American cinema to collections such as Film Noir – The Directors (2012), A Companion to Hitchcock Studies (2011), The British Cinema Book (2009), The Cinema of Britain and Ireland (2005), and The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (1998). He has also has written for journals such as Screen, Sight and Sound, and the Journal of Popular British Cinema. neil sinyard is Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Hull, UK. He has published over twenty books, including works on directors such as Hitchcock, Wilder, Spielberg, and Woody Allen among others, and books on film comedy, silent movies, representations of childhood on film, film adaptation (Filming Literature) and on Graham Greene. He is currently completing a book on the films of William Wyler.

Introduction R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray

Britain’s “New Drama” The twentieth century and after, Christopher Innes proclaims, has been one of the “most vital and exciting periods in English drama, rivaling the Elizabethan theatre in thematic scope and stylistic ambition.”1 The reasons for this efflorescence, however, are not artistic in the narrow sense. The energizing of the British theatre has not depended, for example, on the happy appearance of several exceptionally talented generations of playwrights, though the last long century has certainly witnessed no shortage of talented authors, performers, and production artists of all kinds, as the different chapters in this volume amply illustrate. Innes identifies the underlying motor of this theatrical renaissance as the century’s political, cultural, and social scene. In a Britain wracked by, among other catastrophes, two world wars and the loss of empire, a dizzying rate of change in values and lifestyles has in his view necessitated the kind of “national reappraisal” that the theatre, and the dramatists who felt called to write for it, were best qualified to provide.2 But why should the theatre connect itself to a project of such scope? Clearly, a central role has been played by the model of an engaged theatre pioneered by Henrik Ibsen, the Norwegian dramatist whose controversial Ghosts was produced and performed only once, at the Royalty Theatre in London in 1891, where it was sponsored by the Independent Theatre Society, with attendance restricted to members in order to avoid censorship difficulties. The Lord Chamberlain’s office could still cancel theatrical productions for a variety of reasons, including obscenity. Victorian society was fearful of ideas and themes that threatened the social order and consensus understandings of decency. This was an outlaw moment of sorts, because no other single performance has exerted more influence on a national theatre, setting an agenda that continues to be followed more than a hundred years later and marking a radical break from artistic 1

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R. BARTON PALMER AND WILLIAM ROBERT BRAY

0.1 George Bernard Shaw.

traditions (melodrama and the “well-made play”) that have become increasingly irrelevant, even if they have not disappeared entirely from the contemporary theatrical scene. Along with other noted literati such as Henry James, playwright George Bernard Shaw Shaw (Illustration 0.1) was present at that singular performance of Ghosts, and he was quickly and passionately moved to produce a polemical meditation on what he took to be the playwright’s views about social problems and how these might be resolved. “The Quintessence of Ibsenism” was first published that same year and was continually revised and reissued for the next twenty-five years and more as the ideas of both Ibsen (who remained active until his death in 1906) and Shaw evolved. As much devoted to social analysis as to the theatre tout court, this essay can claim with much justice to be the founding manifesto of modern British drama, even as it provides yet another instance of the global importance of Ibsen, an important figure as well in the establishment of the modern American theatre, as illustrated by the essays in the companion volume to this one, Modern American Drama on Screen. Shaw’s call to arms vilified those he called Philistines (docile members of society who never question its founding values and fundamental practices) and Idealists (who uphold abstractions at the expense of the damage these do to individuals). The playwright championed so-called Realists, who move society ahead because they are relentlessly skeptical of accepted pieties. The lesson Shaw drew from Ghosts, and from Ibsen’s drama more generally, was that “progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step,” a development in which society’s Realists were destined to play a central role – and to good effect if they involved themselves in the

Introduction

3

theatre.3 A necessary antiestablishmentarianism was most effectively promoted on the stage, where it could be enacted in a publicly accessible venue. It would thus be possible to communicate the various aspects of human struggle through the mimetic aspects of performance, which gave apparently living and individual form to vital questions (Ghosts concerns itself with the devastating effects on a family of the patriarch’s adultery). At least insofar as Ibsen and Shaw imagined, the theatre was destined to motor the progressive arc of modernity, with its Enlightenment embodiment of natural rights. Shaw was an ardent Fabian, committed to a gradualist reformism that emphasized the promotion of social justice. His playwriting reflected that intense political engagement, as the Fabians soon morphed into the Labour Party, dedicating themselves to playing the game of electoral politics. Shaw’s embrace of Ibsen’s then-radical vision for the theatre established not only the politics, but also the aesthetic that would thereafter be dominant on the national stage. This “New Drama” would embrace a naturalism that was, like all forms of realism, true to life. But it differed from other traditions in which verism of different kinds was prominent through its emphasis on the rational exchange of opinion about pressing social issues, particularly those aspects of “duty,” broadly considered, that formed the basis of socially acceptable behavior for the middle-class audiences who were the theatre’s most reliable and numerous patrons. As Innes points out, Shaw thus “defined modernism in a way that became standard for mainstream British theatre.”4 The British theatre has never embraced, except occasionally, the contrasting anti-realisms of continental movements such as expressionism or surrealism because these very different forms of theatrical experience focus on the inner life, especially with the intent of liberating the imagination in a manner that a Shavian rationalism would not approve. And yet British writers and directors, not to mention the playgoing public, have tellingly found congenial the anti-Aristotelianism of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht rejected such Ibsenian conventions as missing-fourth-wall sets that staged the dramatic action in domestic interiors – preferring instead to demystify the conventional illusionism of the stage. At the same time, however, Brecht’s disregard for fostering audience emotion in favor of anatomizing intellectual themes, and his emphasis on the connections between character and social values, could be more easily accommodated within Shavian Ibsenism, pushing to the margins other forms such as T. S. Eliot’s poetic drama, the fantasy of J. M. Barrie, and more outré trends such as director Peter Brook’s Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty. It is revealing that Brook, one of the leading lights of postwar theatrical culture, felt he should decamp to Paris in order to pursue his own artistic vision, despite having

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achieved signal (if quite controversial) successes with, among others, his London production of Strauss’s Salome (1949 at the Royal Opera House, with sets by Salvador Dali) and Weiss’s Marat/Sade (1963 for the Royal Shakespeare Company; Brook also directed the acclaimed 1967 film version). The broadly accessible seriousness of the Shavian approach was essentially an innovation as much a rejection of existing conventions (especially the notion of the well-made play, with its conventional dramatic turn toward the re-establishment of consensus social values). For Shaw, such faux seriousness was best exemplified in productions such as Arthur Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (initial production 1893) that focused on social issues as eminently solvable “problems.” In this drama a marital mismatch violates class and moral boundaries and leads inevitably toward a series of tragic outcomes. By the end of the nineteenth century, the British stage had assumed for the most part a less ambitious cultural role as an important, and quite profitable, element of the rapidly expanding entertainment industry. It constituted part of a continuum of performance-based forms that most notably included the music hall, which was also based in theatres in London’s West End. The most important figure of the pre-Shaw theatre was likely Pinero, who enjoyed a substantial success as an actor, director, and especially playwright, composing no fewer than fifty-nine plays, several of which have evidenced a popularity that continued into the twentieth century, as did Pinero’s career (he died in 1934). In 1945, for example, Hollywood produced a well-received and profitable screen version of Pinero’s The Enchanted Cottage (an exercise in heartwarming moralism about inner beauty first produced in London in 1923), while at the time of this writing, a production of his The Magistrate, featuring John Lithgow, is enjoying a successful run at the National Theatre. Audiences, however, are not encouraged to take au grand sérieux that play’s dramatization of the trials and tribulations of an official who barely avoids being ruined by scandal. It is the Shavian tradition that has proven able to help the theatre regain what Innes terms “its position as a forum for public debate,”5 though audiences in Britain are still attracted to the less provocative entertainments provided by Pinero and similarly minded dramatists, who have their contemporary counterparts. Most prominent among these, perhaps, is Alan Ayckbourn, who in a remarkable career has written and produced some seventy plays, a number of which, especially Absurd Person Singular (1972), a witty meditation on contemporary marriage, have been widely popular. Similar plays from the early decades of the twentieth century remain attractive for revival. At the time of writing, there is, for example, a current, and favorably reviewed, production by the English

Introduction

5

Touring Theatre of W. Somerset Maugham’s The Sacred Flame, first produced in 1928. A well-crafted melodrama built around a whodunit murder plot, Maugham’s play reflects the continuing popular appeal of pre-Shavian drama, with its dependence on suspense and surprise, key elements in the well-made play tradition. The continuing cultural and political prominence of the modern British theatre is surely in some sense a surprising development, in large measure because of the omnipresence in Britain, as in the developed world more generally, of film and television, whose reach in the public sphere is continually expanding through the ongoing proliferation of delivery platforms that transcend, even as they personalize and privatize, both the homebased “set” and also the corner cinema. From this point of view, the theatre, firmly rooted in public performance for an audience that is both live and present, seems a throwback. And yet it continues to offer what the other performance-based media cannot, what Innes terms “direct contact with the spectator”; the commercial vitality of the British stage, especially in the greater London area, offers proof of this assertion. Intermediality has dimmed neither the cultural luster of stage performance nor its appeal, especially to the younger, well-educated, and affluent urbanites who constitute a significant sector of the theatre-going public in what is now by common consent one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities – and arguably the global center of commercial theatre, outstripping in number of venues and variety of offerings all its closest competitors, including and especially New York City, whose theatre district, despite the continuing vitality of some Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway venues, has undeniably shrunk since its commercial peak in the 1920s.6 Innes is not alone, however, in pointing out that the abolition of theatrical censorship in 1968 has been crucial to this theatrical renewal, enabling a freer expression of modernist themes than was previously possible. Importantly, the leadership provided by John Trevelyan in the late fifties and sixties at the British Board of Film Censors made sure that the national cinema underwent analogous changes, enabling the production of reasonably authentic adaptations of key plays from the last four decades.7 And the founding of the (Royal) National Theatre in 1963 was a signal moment, reflecting a concern with the preservation and promotion of the national patrimony that goes back at least as far as Matthew Arnold. As Innes observes, this push for a public-sponsored presence raised “awareness of the theatre’s potential for influencing audiences” and fueled debate about “the function of drama, the nature of its reception, and the relationship between form and content.”8 Perhaps such an enshrining of serious

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theatrical traditions as the construction of the National Theatre’s current impressive facilities on the South Bank of the Thames (significantly, after fifteen years of productions at the nearby Old Vic, with its long history of Shakespeare productions) does indeed confirm, as critic Loren Kruger suggests, that there are in Britain likely “no prospects for a national popular theatre” (emphasis hers), nothing on the analogy of France’s Théâtre du peuple.9 Despite its openness to other kinds of dramatic production (among other productions, the current run of The Magistrate bespeaks an earnest attempt at cultural inclusiveness), the National Theatre emphasizes the Shavian tradition, broadly construed. This impressive institution reflects, if it does not exclusively feature, southern sensibilities and traditions, as well as upper-middle-class values and tastes, providing an important, subvented venue for serious productions that might not gain commercial backers in the West End. In keeping with a longstanding concern about the preservation of the national patrimony, the National Theatre does embrace the theatrical past (which would hardly please Shaw), manifesting something like what he dismissed as “Bardolatry,” a preoccupation with Shakespeare that might prevent the stage from committing itself, in the Ibsen manner, to the problems and concerns of the living, those who would profit from the theatre’s function as “a forum for public debate.”

Screening the national stage If the American film industry began with entrepreneurs (notably Thomas Edison), entertainers, and exhibitors producing an attractive curiosity, it quickly morphed into the provider of narrative entertainment, whose increasing dramatic complexity inevitably led filmmakers to draw on the resources of the theatre. This was one of the reasons why the center of film production soon became New York City, where the commercial theatre had long since made its home, with Edison in 1902 building a new glass-topped studio in the city and moving from his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory; and with other companies, notably Biograph, building facilities in the city. Many who worked in the theatre could thus easily sustain a second career in filmmaking, as some producers, notably Adolph Zukor of what would become Paramount Pictures, planned the theatricalizing of the new medium in anticipation of attracting middle-class theatregoers. In partnership with powerful Broadway impresarios (the Frohman brothers), Zukor was eager to promote “Famous Players in Famous Plays,” a cinematic initiative that would take full advantage of the resources, both human and

Introduction

7

literary, of which the New York theatre scene disposed. Expensive and elaborate Biograph studio facilities on 14th Street started operations in 1912, and yet, for a variety of irresistible commercial reasons, within five years the film industry had decamped to Los Angeles. More than 3,000 miles of the country had been put between the geographical locations of the two media, making it much more difficult for the kind of inter-arts cooperation envisaged by Zukor to establish itself and prosper. The early history of the cinema in Britain closely reflects developments in the US. London quickly established itself as the national production center, as British film producers, like Zukor, also sought out closer connections with the theatre, whose cultural capital, so they thought, could be co-opted, lending cinema-going a cultural sheen that would attract middle-class viewers, around whom, as in the US, the profitability of the exhibition sector could be most securely built. The picture palaces that sprung up in both countries, now called theatres because of their deliberate architectural similarity to established theatrical venues, continue to testify to the melding of the two media, which was not inevitable as the cinema established itself, but likely.10 Only in the UK the film business never re-established itself in some location far from the country’s cultural, commercial, and financial center. The two arts have developed together, with many of the century’s most notable performers, writers, and directors pursuing careers in both. Particularly since the beginnings of the sound era in the late 1920s, the British cinema has been heavily populated, if not dominated, by directors, writers, actors, and other creative personnel who remained loyal to careers pursued primarily in the theatre. The continuing financial crises faced by British film production since the 1920s have promoted such an approach to working in the performance arts, as finding secure employment in the cinema has always proved problematic. Central to the development of the National Theatre was Laurence Olivier, its first artistic director and the public figure most responsible for the success of an initiative that had been envisaged, and pursued with varying energies, by many since the late nineteenth century, including theatrical notables such as Granville Barker. Olivier was one of the UK’s most respected and prominent stage actors (a professional standing achieved in large measure through his Shakespeare performances and productions, in which he functioned as something like an actor/manager, following in a nineteenth-century tradition established by Philip Kemble and others). But Olivier also became an internationally acclaimed film star after his appearance in the wildly successful Hollywood adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1939). For the remainder of his career, he continued to act in films, both

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British and American, hardly disdaining the more popular forms of cinema. Consider, among other projects, his roles in the thrillers Marathon Man (1976), where he incarnated a thinly disguised version of one of history’s most evil characters, Dr. Josef Mengele, and The Boys from Brazil (1978), where, interestingly enough, he plays Mengele’s Jewish pursuer. At least until the development of transcontinental air service, such a career was no longer possible in the US after the move of the industry to the West Coast. And even now, as respected figures such as Mike Nichols and Dustin Hoffman move easily from Broadway to Hollywood, no figure comparable to Olivier has ever emerged in the US, whose national theatre, located in Washington DC rather than in New York City, would hardly serve in any case as a cultural platform comparable to its British version. In the UK, by way of contrast, the actor/manager tradition is alive and well in the career of Kenneth Branagh, formerly of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who in 1986 founded the Renaissance Theatre Company, devoted particularly, but not exclusively, to Shakespearean production. Branagh has also followed Olivier in extending the actor/manager model to film production, especially in a series of noteworthy Shakespeare adaptations beginning with Henry V (1989). Like Olivier, Branagh has established and maintained a career in popular filmmaking as well; at the time of writing, post-production work on Branagh’s mounting of the Tom Clancy novel Jack Ryan is just being completed, and it will not be his first foray into action cinema (Branagh will play the megalomaniacal villain, once again following in Olivier’s footsteps). Contemporary Hollywood can boast of no figure comparable to Branagh, who exemplifies the intersection between theatrical and cinematic performance/production encouraged by the peculiar traditions and culture of the UK. Theatre and film are performance media invested in the design and production (in the largest sense of that term) of live action, even if this action is transformed by photography into a different form of artistic material. Because of the elemental homology of the two arts, actors and other creative workers (such as directors and art designers) can easily work in both. Moreover, techniques and traditions, such as acting styles, could usually be readily shared. And the two institutions were not true competitors in the marketplace, though both were angling for their share of the entertainment dollar. Addressing different, but overlapping clienteles, the British national theatre and cinema were disposed toward a symbiosis that made for constant, mutually profitable exchange, in part because film, utilizing photography and thus “capturing” performance (which could then be infinitely duplicated) could overcome the necessary existential and

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logistical difficulties of readily nationalizing its offerings and reaching the proverbial mass public. A filmed drama could be everywhere at once, and its “performances” were not limited in time, but always capable of being revived. Screen versioning provided a stage production with a reach and influence unthinkable for the theatre, whose clientele was geographically limited and whose patrons, because of the continuing costs of live production, were customarily relatively well-off urbanites who could afford ticket prices that were much higher than the commercial cinema, benefiting from huge economies of scale, could afford to charge. From its beginnings, British (and occasionally American) filmmakers could and did extend the reach of the national theatre, in the process profiting notably by drawing on its considerable cultural capital. With its business model dependent on frequently changing programs and hence a constant flow of product to be exhibited, the commercial film industry in the early studio period had a constant need for new material that was suitable for feature film production. Plays, of course, present few of the problems involved in adapting literary fiction for the screen, and, already produced, come with a vision for their effective mounting that is readily available should the filmmakers desire to make use of it, as often happens. Of proven popularity, hit shows from the world’s capital of theatrical production have thus been routinely adapted for the screen in something resembling (and often derived from) their stage form, a phenomenon that accelerated for obvious reasons with the coming of sound cinema at the close of the 1920s. Drama accorded both popular and critical acclaim has provided an attractive sector of filmmaking and exhibition whose vitality shows no signs of diminishing, despite significant changes in both Hollywood and Broadway. In fact, it has been unusual since the 1930s for a successful West End play not to be adapted as a film; and this same principle has held true for National Theatre productions with broad appeal such as Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III (which premiered at the Lyttelton Theatre in 1991, directed by Nicholas Hytner). With television providing yet another exhibition outlet for full-length features since the postwar era, the screen versioning of plays has only become even more common. Many years ago, film theorist André Bazin observed that the fully developed modern cinema will “give back to the theater unstintingly what it took from her,” a generosity dependent on the principle that “there are no plays that cannot be brought to the screen, whatever their style, provided one can visualize a reconversion of stage space in accordance with the data.”11 It is this reconversion of stage space that is always at the center of the cinematic adaptation of theatrical properties, and it makes possible a

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truly artistic approach that avoids the numerous pitfalls of “canned theatre.” If the film business can extend the reach of the national theatre, offering playwrights a mass audience for their work that is theoretically unlimited in time and space, then the film medium possesses the ability to deepen the sense in which dramatic presentation depends on the interaction of characters with a world we can recognize fully as our own. Conceived for a different audience, making use of resources unavailable to the playwright or stage producer, and limited by institutions or traditions that have no purchase on the theatre, screen adaptations of plays make a very strong case for consideration on their own merits and not as necessarily inferior versions of the honored properties on which they are based. Modern British drama has developed as a literary and performance tradition of great authors (and of these there are not many) rather than genres or cycles, and that is hardly surprising, given its origins and the dominating presence of Bernard Shaw. The thirteen essays that constitute this volume address the work of all the major figures who have attained a significant presence on film since the beginning of the sound era, but some of these (such as Shaw himself, Rattigan, and Coward) are better known than others (Russell, Hare, and Jellicoe). Each chapter centers on what editors and authors decided was the most representative or otherwise significant play/film, with a view toward making it possible for this book to serve as the basis for a semester’s examination of the subject. Notes 1. Christopher Innes, Modern British Drama in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002): 1. 2. Innes, Modern British Drama: 1. 3. George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891; New York: Brentano’s, 1917): 8. 4. Innes, Modern British Drama: 5. 5. Innes, Modern British Drama: 1. 6. See Brooks Atkinson, Broadway (New York: Limelight, 1985), for an interesting discussion of these developments. 7. For a useful history of British theatrical censorship, see Anthony Aldgate and James C. Robertson, Censorship in Theatre and Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Aldgate examines the key role played by Trevelyan, and the multifarious connections between a “modernizing” stage and screen, in his Censorship and the Permissive Society (Oxford University Press, 1995). 8. Innes, Modern British Drama: 1. 9. Loren Kruger, The National Stage: Theater and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America (University of Chicago Press, 1992): 84. For France’s Théâtre

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du peuple, see http://theatredupeuple.com/le-theatre-du-peuple/de-1895-a-nosjours (accessed February 2, 2013). 10. For details of this important theatricalizing development see Jeffrey Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 11. André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema,” in Theater and Film, ed. Robert Knopf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005): 110–125.

chapter 1

“That filth from which the glamour is not even yet departed”: adapting Journey’s End Lawrence Napper

In this chapter I’d like to consider the film adaptation of Journey’s End (James Whale, 1930) from three separate angles: as a war film, as an early sound film, and as a British film made in America. From each of these viewpoints we might understand the film as a text of transition between two different languages. In terms of the war film, Journey’s End is often understood as a breakthrough. Alongside All Quiet on the Western Front (which was released in the same year), it seems to offer a newly realistic account of the experience of the war, establishing an iconography and a tone that appears “modern” in the way that earlier representations (in the silent cinema of the 1920s) did not. This apparent modernity of tone chimes with a range of debates in literary studies about the effect that the war had on both writing and the concept of history, and in the first section of the chapter I shall be outlining this context for the film. As an early British sound film, Journey’s End is an example of the ways in which the introduction of sound technology forced a series of discussions about the nature of film language itself, not least in terms of the relationship between film and theatre. This account will draw on the work of one of Journey’s End ’s earliest champions (both in play and film version), the theatre critic James Agate. Unfashionable among film historians today because of his primary allegiance to theatre, Agate’s position as a critic of both stage and screen would seem to make his voice peculiarly pertinent to the wider concerns of this volume. The film adaptation of Journey’s End was the work of a collaboration between two British production companies – Michael Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures and the Welsh-Pearson company. However, in the face of a lack of available sound technology in Britain, the producers took the production to Hollywood, where it was filmed at the Tiffany studios. The third part of this chapter will draw on the diaries of George Pearson, which offer a vivid picture of an experienced British silent filmmaker relishing the opportunities offered by the new sound technology, but nevertheless concerned to resist pressures from his American colleagues to 12

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recast his theatrical adaptation into more “cinematic” language, both at the level of shot, and also at the level of Hollywood narrative convention. We might understand the film adaptation of Journey’s End, then, as subject to three separate struggles over language and representation occurring at the moment of its production – the war and modernity, silent and sound cinema, and British and American cinema. In all three of these struggles, the tension between stage and cinema is also implicit, as I hope to demonstrate in what follows.

War and modernity Studies of the representation of the First World War in British films usually start with Journey’s End and often claim that the play (and the film) mark a new departure in the representation of the war in Britain – an increased “realism,” a concern with the everyday detail of life in the trenches, and an emphasis on the futility, irony, and hopelessness of war as experienced by those fighting it. These characteristics appeal to us as a more modern, more believable way of representing the conflict than the variety of representations of the First World War found in the silent cinema of the previous decade. Those 1920s films are seldom talked about, and certainly almost never seen, although they remain fascinating partly because of the astonishing range of positions they take up with regard to the war, coupled with a similarly astonishing range of cinematic modes and languages they adopt – “official” semi-documentary accounts such as Ypres (Walter Summers, 1925), popular sentimental melodramas such as A Girl of London (Henry Edwards, 1925), adventure stories such as Poppies of Flanders (Arthur Maude, 1927), and quasireligious remembrance films, such as Remembrance (Bert Wynne, 1927). None of these twenties films can really be recruited to the category of the “anti-war” film. How could they, given that they were designed for audiences who were still viscerally living with the consequences of the sacrifices that had been made in their names? Instead, we can view those films as variously involved in processing the experience of the war for their mass audiences – audiences who had after all only just lived through the experience, and whose lives (and outlooks) had been altered by it, often in quite profound ways. These 1920s films have nevertheless been largely neglected. This neglect is all the more surprising because the same theme in literary studies – the influence of the First World War on the writing of the early twentieth century, and specifically on modernism – is the subject of a wide and continuing debate. That debate was famously initiated by Paul Fussell in his book, The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell’s (now widely

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contested) thesis was that the Great War marked a break both in language and in the conception of history that went with it. A nineteenth-century mode of expression associated with the “High Diction” of notions such as “Honour,” “Glory,” “Heroic Sacrifice,” and “Chivalry” died in the trenches, according to Fussell, to be replaced by a modern mode of language which is marked by irony, and which rejects the recourse to high ideals in favour of meticulous but coldly scientific description of otherwise emotive scenes. With this shift came a transformation in the notion of history. Recalling the famous recruiting poster showing a future child asking, “What Did You Do In the Great War Daddy?”, Fussell suggests that its power relies on an understanding of history as purposeful – “involving a coherent stream of time running from past through present to the future.” Today, he suggests, “no such appeal would shame even the most stupid to the recruiting office.”1 Fussell’s thesis is rather monolithic, and to a certain extent it relies on a notion of modernity that is co-terminus with modernism, so that texts working in the older language (rather as the twenties films cited above do) get either dismissed or ignored. A modification of the theme is provided by Samuel Hynes’s majestic study, A War Imagined. Hynes’s account is more nuanced in that it pays attention to the gradual process by which the more modern mode begins to take over from the older mode, understanding that process as a gradual one which occurs throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. He sees the interwar period as one marked by competing languages – by a range of different modes of expression that co-exist in a long period of transition. Hynes quotes an example of the clash of the two modes of language. It is a 1915 letter from Ronald Leighton (serving at the battle of Loos) to Vera Brittain. Leighton is describing a captured German trench, but he is also responding to the fact that Brittain had sent him a copy of Rupert Brooke’s best-selling volume of poems 1914: Let him who thinks that War is a glorious golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country with . . . thoughtless and fervid faith . . . Let him look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin bone and what might have been Its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half-crouching as it fell, supported on one arm, perfect but that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped around it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence.

As Hynes goes on to point out, two languages are consciously being evoked here, one “marked by the big, capitalized abstractions. The other, the alternative rhetoric, is plain, descriptive, emptied of value statements; it

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names the broken fragments of the trench world, as though reality consisted only in the ruins of things.”2 Both Fussell’s and Hynes’s accounts are literary. They emphasize literary worth as part of their project; thus their impulse is not so much about how people during the period used these texts to make sense of and understand their war experiences, as it is about how we might interpret the conflict from the vantage point of today. In this respect the more modern language will always win out, not least because its interpretation of the war as “waste” fits our own modern interpretation, which first really emerged during the 1960s – the Oh What A Lovely War myth of “lions led by donkeys,” which retains a remarkable grip on the popular imagination despite over twenty years of revisionist history that seeks to interpret it in very different and contradictory ways.3 For a less deterministic account, one might turn to Rosa Maria Bracco’s book Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War.4 Here, by concentrating on non-canonized but commercially highly successful authors, Bracco offers a picture of war writing in the interwar period where the older modes of language and moral interpretive strategies are much stronger and more persistent, alongside an acknowledgement that these strategies did indeed appeal to popular audiences of the period as a way of interpreting or processing their own war experiences. This picture very much chimes with my own understanding of how popular cinematic versions operated, and it is significant that the final case study of Bracco’s volume – one which takes up almost a third of the book – is a detailed discussion and analysis of the gestation and then spectacular commercial success of the stage version of Journey’s End. That story by now is well known to any “A” Level student. R. C. Sherriff, a veteran of the trenches, wrote the play while working as a clerk for the Sun Insurance Company. Sherriff had written several plays already, all intended as amateur productions to raise money for his local rowing club. Ambitious for a wider audience, he sent Journey’s End to the agent Curtis Brown, who regretfully informed him that it stood little chance of success – the public was tired of war subjects, and besides, no play without a leading lady would be attractive to commercial producers. Nevertheless, the play attracted the attention of the Stage Society – an organization dedicated to producing oneoff performances of new but noncommercial works. Directed by James Whale (Illustration 1.1) and starring Laurence Olivier (both then relative unknowns), it was premiered before a host of important producers and theatrical agents at the Apollo Theatre in December 1928. Despite widespread critical praise however, its future remained uncertain. Eventually, a producer new to London, Maurice Browne, stepped forward and mounted

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1.1 James Whale, who directed the film version of Journey’s End.

1.2 The most important relationship in the film is between Lieutenant Raleigh (David Manners) and Captain Stanhope (Colin Clive), an old friend on the verge of nervous collapse.

the play at the Savoy Theatre, where it opened on January 21, 1929 (starring Colin Clive) and ran to full houses for two years (Illustration 1.2). By the time the film adaptation appeared in the spring of 1930, its publicity could boast that the play had been produced by 55 companies world wide, in 21 languages, and enjoyed runs of over 100 performances in Berlin and New York, and over 500 in London.5 One of the key themes of Bracco’s account is the way the play’s reputation has shifted through time. Initially it was understood as profound in its

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realism – a realism immediately recognized by the veterans among its audience. The action never moves away from the claustrophobic dugout in which all of the characters are forced to endure each other’s company under extreme conditions, and there is a concentration on both the mundane, surreal details of this existence and the theme of duty and sacrifice, in which all of the characters are rigorously tested. While at the time the play was understood as a tribute to these ideals within a context of moving and rigorous realism, later, towards the 1960s, the play came to be interpreted as an anti-war text, specifically critical of the values that the characters appear to espouse. This later interpretation, as Bracco documents, was rigorously resisted by Sheriff. Throughout his life he argued that the play had no overt political function, but was merely a tribute to his comrades and an examination and celebration of the privations they had endured and the sacrifices they had made. The pressbook for the film version might be said to sum up the spirit of the way it was received in 1929: Journey’s End, the most talked of play of the century, repeats its success as a film. Its appeal is general because it epitomizes the attitude of all Englishmen towards war. Its characters appear – not as imaginary figures – but as the living prototypes of men of every class who fought willingly or unwillingly in the struggle for right.6

There is no possibility here that the project of the war might not be considered as a “struggle for right,” despite the acknowledgement and acceptance that some men fought “unwillingly.” The overriding theme of the publicity is the way in which the play evokes “Truth” as a universalizing term of value which one might understand as key in both old-fashioned “high diction” and in more modern language modes. That mode, even in the American reviews of the film, was understood to transcend the translation from stage to screen. As the reviewer for the American Film Mercury claimed, I consider it the finest motion picture I have ever seen, not because it is a motion picture, but because the play, the lines, etc., are so fine that it is looking at a page of Life. It is a breathing document of men in the front line trenches. After the realism of this cinema, I cannot see how any other war film would not seem trivial.7

James Agate and the debate over sound film At this point it might be fruitful to turn away from Journey’s End itself and consider how some of these concerns about truth and language were also being evoked in the debates around the introduction of the talkies in

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Britain, and to introduce these debates through the curious figure of James Agate. Agate is more or less forgotten today, but in the 1920s and 1930s he was an important and influential film critic. There are, I think, two clear reasons why he is no longer remembered alongside oft-quoted contemporaries such as C. A. Lejeune, Dilys Powell, or Richard Winnington. Firstly, he was primarily a theatrical critic. His weekly column in The Sunday Times was arguably the most influential drama criticism throughout the interwar period, and he was also a regular contributor to the BBC’s broadcasts of drama criticism from the late 1920s onwards. His film columns in the Tatler (beginning as early as 1928) were, by contrast, rigorously populist. Secondly, unlike his contemporaries he showed a marked resistance to developing a set of critical criteria for “good” cinema. His writing generally is marked by flippancy, contradiction, anecdote, and digression. He is much more likely to devote time in his column to describing his experience of cinema-going – the cinema building, the music, the associations the film elicited in him, the dinner he enjoyed after the show, than the film itself or its cinematic technique. It’s not difficult to see why these qualities of Agate’s – his allegiance to theatre and his emphasis on the ephemeral, experiential nature of cinemagoing – might lead to his being dismissed as “a highbrow waffler,” but I’d like to suggest that it is precisely these qualities that make him a suitable guide for thinking about the moment of the adaptation of Journey’s End between 1929 and 1930. For, of course, the relationship between theatre and cinema was receiving renewed attention in that moment, initiated by a radical change in the cinema-going experience itself – a change caused by the introduction of synchronized sound. It might be useful at this point to rehearse briefly the key documents that usually get quoted in orthodox accounts of this transition. Firstly, the early dismay from Close Up writers at the threat that sound seemed to pose for the new art form of cinema, which they understood as profoundly visual and defined above all by montage. Secondly, the manifesto reprinted in Close Up from Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandroff, welcoming sound as a potential addition to cinematic language as long as it’s handled in the right way. Here they emphasized sound montage – rhythmic sound editing, intellectual contrapuntal effects, etc. They stressed the idea of molding sound, as the image is molded in silent cinema, rather than simply using sound as an indexical accompaniment to the “realism” of dialogue scenes.8 Finally, the championing of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929) by Macpherson and others in Close Up, as moving toward the potential that this manifesto suggests – particularly in the “knife” sequence.9 All of these,

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of course, emphasize a “good” use of sound as “cinematic” over a “bad” use of sound as theatrical – the static “canned theatre” which Hitchcock was able to conjure up and dismiss with such efficiency in the 1966 Truffaut interview, where he emphasized Blackmail as a heroic intervention in an otherwise aesthetically conservative and backward-looking industry. In accounts drawing on these familiar documents as evidence, the competing models of “cinematic sound” and “filmed theatre” are clean and clear-cut, the winning status of the former never really in question. Agate is never quoted, but of course as a theatrical and film critic he is particularly invested in such debates. And his criticism from around this time reveals a much more complex picture of the transition. Here is a typically roundabout opening gambit from him on this subject from March 1929: A former army service corps officer recounts how one day in the early part of the war, when he was unloading biscuits, Sir John French, as he was, rode up to him and said: “How’s the battle going?” My friend looked up from his biscuit tins and said: “Sorry, sir, and all that sort of thing, but I didn’t know there was a battle on!” Nobody could be in any such doubt as to the battle now raging on the film front. The difficulty about this battle is that the front is extended to such a length that nobody can survey the whole of it, in addition to which that front seems to be made up of numbers of small parts in no way related to each other. I should like in this article to glance at one or two bits of the line in the great talkie war.10

The passage is peculiarly appropriate to my concerns here, because it so neatly uses a wartime metaphor to describe the “battle” over sound. Notice also how Agate’s metaphor is not of a war of movement, with sound sweeping to a clear victory on the side of the righteous, but rather it is of a war of attrition, with small skirmishes here and there, and an inability to assess or understand the overall picture from a position “on the ground.” Six months earlier, in October 1928, he considers the “talkie problem” in detail across two weekly columns. He arranges his difficulties into three main categories: firstly, and perhaps most predictably, there is the question of language – not the language spoken, but the language of film itself. “Will the talkies increase or decrease the spectator’s illusion that he is looking at life?” he asks, The theatre has imposed on us, and we have agreed to accept, a number of conventions as the result of which the spectator in the theatre appears to be looking at life through a fourth wall. Up to now the conventions of the cinema have asked us to believe that we have been looking at life through a glass and sound-proof window. Will the percolation of sound through that window increase or decrease the illusion?11

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It is important to note here that this is not the usual complaint about the static camera in early sound films, but rather a more nuanced consideration of the way in which sound might destroy the illusion of fluency offered by mature editing techniques – his glass and sound-proof window of the cinema is analogous to the fourth wall of the theatre, but it is not the same as that convention, and he is worried that it is the cinematic convention that will be destroyed by sound, causing spectators to be reminded of, and “hanker after that other medium which is the theatre.”12 Cinema in its silent mode had been unfettered in its use of editing and camera movement. Agate’s concern is not that this fluid style will be destroyed (as indeed it briefly was), but that the very presence of sound will draw attention to its artificiality. Quoting approvingly the manifesto of Eisenstein and company, Agate reiterates the notion that “among those immutable laws is one which lays down that of two examples in any art, that one will be the more effective which sticks closer to its medium.”13 The change in the language of editing necessitated by sound, he suggests, may threaten this principle. Thus, Agate’s second issue with the talkies is that they will necessitate a change in editing techniques to accommodate sound, tying the visual style to the logic of sound in a way that we are now used to attributing in early sound films to a failure in the early technology. For a skeptical but not dismissive critic such as Agate, then, the principal problem with the talkies involves the change in cinematic language that he foresees they will necessitate. Although his background is in the theatre, he is very cautious about the notion that sound offers the films the opportunity simply to reproduce theatrical pleasures. “Talkies are not all of one kind,” he reminds his readers seven months later in May 1929, There is the photo-play or stage play, photographed with the actors speaking their parts aloud. This has hardly anything to do with the film as we used to know it. It merely provides a bastard kind of play-going, and it is too early yet to say whether people will like this form of entertainment when the novelty has worn off . . . [and then there is] the sound film.14

By this time enough examples of good talkies have penetrated the British exhibition scene to convince him of the possibilities of the “sound film,” and he champions them willingly. However, he retains some key reservations, which again involve the change in language, or more specifically in tone, that the new technology produces – changes which are increasingly to do with dialogue and nationality. Agate’s third objection to the sound films in the previous year involved the loss of musical accompaniment they necessitated. September 1929 saw

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him visiting a new super-cinema in Brixton. Despite the fact that in this period he now advocates sound cinema, he nevertheless remains resistant, and once again his reservations revolve around the way that language might translate in the new medium: It is true that there was a talkie on that afternoon, but I took advantage of this to inspect the lighting plant, the drains, and the strictly business side of the venture. The talkie being over, I saw an admirable silent film about a New York journalist. “Get your street scenery on,” said that journalist to a chorus girl. “You’re going up town with God’s gift to literature!” But he had the sense to say it in a sub-title. While Mr Haines was delivering himself of this amiable nonsense, the first-class orchestra played Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” Overture . . . and if I mistake not, “The Lost Chord.” And I hereby announce that in the bosom of one cinema fan there is more joy over chords that are lost than over tongues that are found.15

Two things evidently are going on here (aside from the music issue). The first is that the modes of address – in dialogue terms, but also in terms of the story as a whole – that are acceptable within the particular conventions of silent cinema become ridiculous when translated into the “realism” of sound. The other is that those modes are culturally coded – it is American conventions of speech or of storytelling that Agate objects to. He is not alone. Finding himself at dinner with a range of stiffly conventional but socially eminent gentlemen at a society “do” in January 1930, he argues strenuously against their objections to the limitations of sound technology: About one o’clock in the morning I got them to agree that if mechanical imperfections had not already been conquered, they would be. What about the quality of the stuff reproduced perfectly, or imperfectly, I then asked them? Here, again, I found extraordinary unanimity. Not one man present had any objection to vulgarity as such; all the objections centred on the fact that the vulgarities being disseminated were not British vulgarities. Nobody had any objection to the vulgarizing of the youthful English mind; it was the Americanizing of our infants which stuck in their eminent gills.16

It seems to me that for critics such as Agate, the question of Americanization is linked to the other anxiety over the tonal quality of the fictions that are being reproduced, in a way which actually reverses our more common assumptions about the success of American cinema in creating a storytelling mode that is both international and sympathetic to the medium. British film historians are used to considering the success of Hollywood films in contrast to the widely assumed inability of British cinema (particularly in the silent period) to create a modern international cinematic style that isn’t reliant on theatrical or literary models. For Agate, it is the American silent

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cinematic style that seems unsuited to sound as a medium – revealed as vulgar, footling, and ridiculous under the heightened realism of the new technique. By contrast, the sound film he chooses to champion above all others in this period is a British one, and a British one that reveals most clearly its debt to the theatre. As we have seen, the writers of Close Up went wild for Hitchcock’s Blackmail, cementing its position in the canon of Hitchcock’s great achievements in a way that tends to overshadow the sound films he made immediately afterwards. In contrast to Blackmail, these films – Juno and the Paycock and The Skin Game – show little innovation in sound technique – they are filmed theatre, texts which (unlike Blackmail) simply couldn’t have been made in silent versions, so reliant are they on the structure and dialogue of the original stage productions. This is an irrelevant caveat for Agate, so excited is he to have at last found a film which appears to speak for an adult audience. Bravo, Elstree! Bravo, Mr. Hitchcock! Bravo, the Irish Players! And bravo, Mr. Edward Chapman! British International Pictures Ltd. and these fine artists have between them put together one of the most remarkable films that it has ever been anybody’s pleasure to see. Just as Elstree Calling was, in my view, unmitigated footle, which would have bored an infants’ school, so Juno and the Paycock appears to me to be very nearly a masterpiece. It would be quite a masterpiece but for the fact of our consciousness throughout that what we are witnessing has not been conceived as a film but is a photographed play. I do not think this matters very much, and in any case audiences which have not seen the play may not have this consciousness. But I desire to say, and to say with all possible emphasis, that here is a film which completely justifies the talkies.17

Notice the excitement that this passage communicates around sound cinema, specifically for British productions. Agate wasn’t alone in this. We might remember the relative failure of Hitchcock’s earlier silent version of Noël Coward’s Easy Virtue (and at the same time of Brunel’s The Vortex) – the distinctive qualities of Coward’s work, simply un-translatable in silent terms. For many British producers, the advent of sound cinema represented a golden opportunity to exploit the potential of the British theatrical canon. Basil Dean indeed set up Associated Talking Pictures with precisely this business model, as Victoria Lowe has eloquently described.18 Given this sense of the opportunity offered by sound cinema, we shouldn’t be surprised to find British film producers moving quickly to capitalize on the remarkable international success of Journey’s End, still playing to packed houses at the Savoy Theatre, already translated into twenty-one languages, and being presented by fifty-one companies world wide.

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George Pearson and Journey’s End Journey’s End, with its setting exclusively in the confines of a dugout, and its very British emphasis on repressed emotionality that is only exposed through a welter of dialogue about apparently insignificant day-to-day matters, is precisely the kind of theatrical property which couldn’t conceivably be translated into silent cinema. An understanding of that fact is indeed demonstrated by Gainsborough and Welsh-Pearson, the production companies who acquired the rights to the piece specifically as their first full foray into the new medium. Gainsborough’s studios at this time being closed for the installation of sound technology, they went to the trouble to create a co-production deal with the Tiffany studios in America, and sent the entire production to Hollywood to take advantage of the superior sound recording technology available there. George Pearson, one of the producers, was sent with it to oversee the process, and his detailed diaries of this rather stressful period survive in the Special Collections of the BFI Library. They provide a highly personal and often quite moving account of the pressures of filmmaking under the constant watch of demanding money-men on both sides of the Atlantic, and also of the strain involved in juggling not only various creative egos, but also competing national concepts of the language of cinema. Pearson was no rookie. Aged fifty-four by this time, he had enjoyed a distinguished and successful career directing and producing British silent films, gaining recognition for his Ultus serial in 1917, and scoring a spectacular success in 1921 with his popular hit Squibs and its several sequels. He was thoroughly conversant with silent technique and with the First World War as a subject. His Reveille of 1924 had been particularly praised for its moving use of both montage and silence in a sequence depicting the 11 o’clock silence on Armistice Day, and one of his principal functions on Journey’s End was to guide the director of the play (and now the film), James Whale, through his first film assignment, advising him of the difference between stage and cinema techniques, partly in order to ensure that what was produced was not “canned theatre.” Nevertheless, the “Notes on the Adaptation of Journey’s End,” which appear in the front of the diary, and which he appears to have drafted on the voyage over in the (as it turned out) correct anticipation of some difficult script meetings early on, demonstrate an absolute determination to resist pressure from his American partners to remold the piece along the lines of Hollywood cinematic conventions:

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Journey’s End is too magnificently great to meddle with under the delusion that it can be “improved.” That would be sheer impertinence – sacrilege – outrage. Any process of “adaptation” to another medium such as the film demands an unequivocal acceptance of this recognition at the outset. Cinema has no function regarding “improvement”; it has only to discover just how much gentle fashioning to its own medium it may dare impose on a great work of art in stagecraft, to bring it unsullied and unimpaired to the screen – nothing more.19

For Pearson, then, there is no question that the play remains “a work of art in stagecraft” and that an adaptation of it to cinema can only ever be subservient to this status. This does not mean, of course, the sort of fixed camera proscenium filming of “canned theatre,” but rather an acknowledgement that the essential stage effects – the performances and the characterizations – are to be enhanced by film technique, through the use of close-up on performance, rather than added to by symbolic or other selfconsciously cinematic techniques. With the coming of speech and sound to the cinema the whole conception of function had to change. “Cinematics” or purely visual appeal, which had advanced in technique by leaps and bounds was no longer the tremendous ideal. A new force added to visual appeal, and so powerful a force, demanded a new orientation of thought – and it is regrettable to admit that it seems as yet but few recognize the new horizons. The adherents of the old purely visualistic cinema feel that the visualistic technique that perforce functioned without definite sound or speech must needs impose all the old and often circumlocutory methods upon material that given sound and speech needs no trickery.20

We are accustomed to attributing the lack of visual montage techniques in early sound cinema to a failure in either technology or imagination. What is fascinating about this passage is that it offers a completely different interpretation. Here is a man, well versed in “the old purely visualistic cinema,” contemplating with some excitement the prospect of being able to dispense with “all the old and often circumlocutory methods” in the face of the new technology – for him sound offers the opportunity to get rid of some of the burdensome language codes of silent cinema and to contemplate a new kind of filmmaking that “needs no trickery.” Pearson offers an example: I suggest that the technician steeped in visualistic cinema might think it evidence of genius to bring me to a close up of Stanhope’s wallet – a glimpse of Madge’s photo – trembling fingers handling it . . . all a puerile trick that

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suggests I have no imagination. It is not the wallet that matters – it is Stanhope. behaviourism not exhibitionism of trifles. For God’s Sake, give me credit for knowing what is in that wallet – but let me see into Stanhope’s soul when HE handles it.21

Because of sound, there is no need to cut away to the details of what he is looking at – the camera instead can concentrate on performance. Pearson is similarly adamant that there should be no “additions” to the text offered for the sake of opening the story out – particularly with reference to the repeated requests from other producers and script editors that flashback scenes should be included offering an account of the main character’s romance with Madge, who might then be personified by a leading actress. Nevertheless, he accepts that some extremely limited opening out, “an extension, not an addition,” might be possible in showing the scenes of a trench raid (Illustration 1.3) which occurs offstage in the play. In his strenuous negotiations throughout the production process, Pearson was able to achieve all he wished for in the text, although these concessions appear to have come at a cost. Early on during the production he found the atmosphere of Hollywood exciting and stimulating. Nevertheless, as the weeks wore on, he began to feel demoralized, both by his position of governess to Whale, and by the endless wrangles that the collaborative process involved. Significantly, his resentment at the praise Whale was eliciting, as opposed to what he saw as the inconvenience and expense of Whale’s cinematic inexperience, came to dominate the diary: 17th Dec [1929]: I feel Whale has got to be shocked out of his stage ideas or we shall have some poor cinema stuff. He is learning at our expense in many cases.

1.3 When Raleigh is mortally wounded in a trench raid, Stanhope stays with him while he dies, unsure if, now friendless and alone, he can face the inevitable German assault.

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2nd Jan [1930]: All this time wasted by JW wanting 10 take scenes of 10 minutes duration . . . After wasting many and many thousands of feet of film he came round to my viewpoint. Cook warned too but we can’t alter things now. It is near the end and we have a good film, but JWs lack of experience has cost us dearly. 30th Jan [1930]: Whale very excited about his possibility of earning tremendous figures through Journey’s End acclaim . . . Again today, even in cutting, I had to convince him by getting cutters in to see my advice was right, and in the end he accepted it and I heard him later say how well he had arranged the way it was shot etc. He never would have shot it at all had I not insisted! Oh God! And he goes on to get 3000 dollars a week, and I don’t even get a break in England! What a fool I have been!! I have given away ideas all my life and have reaped nothing.22

Despite Pearson’s disillusionment, the film did get finished, and its reception both in America and in England seemed to vindicate Pearson’s (and Gainsborough’s) faith in the possibilities that sound film offered to theatrical adaptations. Indeed, even as he was putting the finishing touches to the credit sequences and preparing for the voyage home, Pearson records being at a studio party, where: [8th Feb 1930] Von Stroheim opened his heart to me about his annoyance of Hollywood negativity re: the Stage . . . It was all amazing and how different from England. One and all said they couldn’t understand why we in England couldn’t sense an opportunity that was slipping away from us under our very noses. Why didn’t I go back and tell them what to do instead etc etc?23

Conclusion – James Agate and Journey’s End In conclusion, we might return to James Agate, his response to the release of the film version of Journey’s End, and the transition between two types of language initiated by the First World War. Agate discusses the film in three different columns – an indication of how important an intervention he thinks it represents. Nevertheless, the first column, entitled “A Tootle on the Trumpet,” is typical of his style, in that it is entirely concerned with his claim to be responsible for the success of the stage version. He was, he claims, a member of the select Stage Society audience who saw the first production at the Apollo, and it was as a result of two BBC broadcasts of his both praising the play, and berating the public for being too stupid to understand its importance and power, that it was picked up by Maurice Browne, and then adopted by the theatre-going public. He hastens to point out that he doesn’t think it a great play in and of itself, but

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In December 1928 I was weary of American films showing how the war centered on some Flanders flapper. At this Bow time the makers of war films attempted little beyond drawing Clara at a venture. Journey’s End did something more. It showed us a number of credible people engaged in a credible way in the incredible business of war.24

Here again, the play is valued precisely because it resists narrative conventions deemed to come from elsewhere (specifically Hollywood) vested in the figure of the woman and thus “romance,” in favour of a version of “realism.” His second column on the film itself tackles the difference between the film and the play, and deems the film to be superior, again because of its heightened “reality”: Seen in the theatre, that dug-out did not seem a very uncomfortable sort of place . . . One did not visualize – or at least I did not – the complete desolation which began at the top of the stairs. There is one shot in the film showing an expanse of liquid mud with a bit of a tree and some broken railings sticking out of it which brings home to me the horrid reality of the whole business. When, in the theatre, they talked of a raid and of bringing in the German prisoner, I am afraid I did not realize anything more than a pleasant skirmish on some smiling golf-links and hiking somebody out of a bunker . . . I certainly did not visualize the dragging of the fellow back through seas of mud and slime. This may only serve to show my inexpertness as a playgoer and expose the fact that I have none of these actual experiences which the incident must have revived for those who possess them. But there it is. In other words, war as presented in the play seemed to be on the whole a gallant, heroic business, whereas the film shows war as the essentially foul, beastly thing it is.25

Again, two different languages are contrasted here – war as gallant (in the theatre), versus war as beastly (in the cinema). And yet, the distinction still isn’t as clear as we might expect it to be, for Agate then goes on to reflect on the paradox that although “the business end” of the last war was grim, it nevertheless elicited some great and beautiful emotions from its combatants. He is moved to quote an extremely long passage (in fact it takes up half the entire column) of “High Diction,” expressing this idea in terms of each man’s “sufficient beauty.” Only at the end of the passage does he admit it to be a piece of his own writing – “When I wrote that passage I believed every word of it,” he admits, But what, pray, has it to do with lying in the open with one or more bullets through one’s stomach? . . . I hold Journey’s End to be better as a film than as a play, because it begins to give an indication of that filth from which the glamour is not yet even departed.26

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“That filth from which the glamour is not yet even departed ” seems to be a perfect expression of the double language system operating at this period to describe the war experience – a sort of twin of the passage quoted by Hynes above, but from the opposite point of view. Agate returns to the fray the following week, in a column devoted to the Hollywood adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. Noting that all around him this film is garnering extravagant praise, Agate struggles with his own failure to respond to it. This appears once again to involve the interaction between the film and the transitions in language I’ve been attempting to describe – the change from High Diction to a more modern “realism,” from silent to sound conventions, and between British and American modes. “This film did not begin to have the effect on me of Mons, Four Sons, or even the film version of Journey’s End,” he admits, Yet I know this Remarque film is a much bigger business than the lastmentioned, and that all there is in Mr Sherriff’s compact, workmanlike little piece could be tucked away in single chapters of Remarque. The one is an episode; the other an epic.27

That epic quality perhaps is the problem, for it overrides the precise factual language “emptied of value statements,” which Hynes identifies as the modern mode of expression arising from wartime experience. Agate in fact quotes such a passage in his discussion, identifying a lack of such a mode in the film, a mode that in hindsight he had found in Journey’s End: I was surprised to find nothing . . . – shall I say? – disconcerting in All Quiet. One saw many men killed. After which they appeared to vanish. For the film does not show so much as a dead horse lying about. I suppose I expected to receive at least the impression of what must be the most sickening thing in war – its dreadful stench. There is a passage in some other war book in which a soldier describes his horror when first he felt the ground give beneath his feet, and discovered that he was treading not upon earth but upon a dead man. There is nothing of this in the present film. Some preliminary literature informed me that “never has spectacle and stark realism of war been more thrillingly conveyed.” I beg to differ. The single view of the war-scape in Journey’s End was in my view more drear than anything in All Quiet.28

Finally, both the dialogue and the sound are identified as problematic, because they so clearly link the film to its origins in Hollywood – the “realism” of the technology forcing on the text a specificity that prevents Agate from suspending his disbelief: My disappointment began as soon as I realized that the soldiers in the film were not young Germans torn from their homes, but admirable film actors

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magnificently entrenched at Hollywood. Paul is excellently played by Mr. Lewis Ayres. But the pretense that he is a German must surely vanish when you hear him say: “He wants me to wear my uniform around.”

It is a problem, finally, which Agate, despite the fact that he has become a champion of sound technology, suggests would not have arisen in a silent film: I think what is really the matter with this film is that it insists upon being a talkie, which means, of course, realistic dialogue infinitely trivial in comparison with the scope of the picture as a whole. Silence the babble and raise the same events to significance through music from the great masters, and I believe I should be completely moved.29

For Agate then, the epic qualities of All Quiet on the Western Front were undercut by the banal details forced on the film’s meanings by sound. Sound fixed the film too specifically to its cultural and geographical origins, limiting the film’s ability to speak internationally, and rendering its epic qualities trivial. By contrast, the use of sound in Journey’s End worked in the opposite direction. The specificity of Journey’s End, the confined, theatrical nature of its setting and treatment, and its emphasis on the banality of trivial chatter in the face of grand events gave the film a modern quality much more suited to its theme. As Bracco has noted, the conclusions drawn from Sheriff’s play have changed as attitudes to the First World War have changed. Made at the intersection between a variety of shifting language systems – between stage and screen, silent and sound cinema, Britain and Hollywood, “high diction” and “modernist” war writing, the film adaptation of Journey’s End offers a fascinating insight into the debates and possibilities which those changing languages appeared, even fleetingly, to offer contemporary observers. Notes 1. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford University Press, 1977): 21. 2. Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Pimlico, 1992): 112. 3. See for instance Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2005). 4. Rosa Maria Bracco, Merchants of Hope: British Middlebrow Writers and the First World War (Oxford and Providence, RI: Berg, 1993). 5. Pressbook for Journey’s End (BFI Special Collections: George Pearson Collection, Item 24): 5. 6. Ibid., 1.

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7. Ibid., 15. 8. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus, Close Up 1927–1933: Cinema and Modernism (London: Cassell, 1998): 83. 9. Donald et al., Close Up: 89. 10. James Agate, Around Cinemas (London: Home & Van Thal, 1946): 43. 11. Ibid., 27. 12. Ibid., 28. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 44. 15. Ibid., 53. 16. Ibid., 57. 17. Ibid., 59. 18. Victoria Lowe, “Escape from the Stage? From the Playscript to Screenplay in British Cinema’s Early Sound Period,” Journal of Screenwriting, 2.2 (March 2011): 213–226. 19. George Pearson, “Hollywood Diary” (unpublished, 1929–1930) (BFI Special Collections: George Pearson Collection, Item 11) [the diary is not paginated]. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. By the time he came to write his autobiography in 1957, Pearson seems to have strategically forgotten these frustrations, commenting only that: “Whale rapidly demonstrated his able understanding of the film medium. In after years he was rated as one of the very few outstanding film-directors.” George Pearson, Flashback: An Autobiography of a British Film Maker (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957): 170. 23. Pearson, “Hollywood Diary.” 24. Agate, Around Cinemas: 63. 25. Ibid., 65. 26. Ibid., 67. 27. Ibid., 68. 28. Ibid., 69. 29. Ibid., 70.

chapter 2

Playful banter in Shaw’s Pygmalion Douglas McFarland

Bernard Shaw summed up his attitude toward the possibility of adapting his plays for the screen in a 1924 interview: “It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.”1 He primarily objected to the absence of language in silent films and what he later would perceive to be the limited role of dialogue in the talkies. For Shaw language was the essence of his art. To erase language would be to eradicate not simply the artist’s medium, but the artist himself. Shaw’s second objection to adaptation was a socio-economic one. Although it might seem odd coming from a Fabian socialist, Shaw quite condescendingly took a dim view of the middle- and lower-class audiences that film attracted. With its roots in vaudeville and arcades, Shaw judged the movie house as a venue to entertain the masses rather than to teach virtue to an educated elite. “Democracy,” as Shaw put it, “always prefers the secondbest.”2 If one thing is certain about Shaw, it is that he did not consider anything about himself as “second-best.” Another and perhaps more telling explanation of Shaw’s resistance to adaptation concerns a fundamental difference between theatrical and cinematic representation. In the same interview cited above, Shaw laments that once an audience has seen the film, they won’t need the play.3 Tennessee Williams expresses a similar anxiety when discussing screen adaptation. Putting it rather succinctly, he declares, “Films are more lasting than play productions.”4 The objections of Shaw and Williams spring from a visceral fear of the loss of proprietary authority over their work. Theatrical production is by nature ephemeral. Once the curtain has fallen in the theatre, that particular performance is relegated to memory. Any future production is a revival, a return to life of what the playwright had originally created. To put it differently, the life of a play is never terminated; it simply morphs into new configurations. A film version of a play, however, is a fixed, and hence a definitive, form of the play. It cannot be revived, only repeated in its same form. There will no longer be any need for a printed edition upon which future productions might be based. Moreover, any type of control over the 31

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play which the author might retain, any sort of influence he or she might have on future productions, will be lost once the play is filmed. This anxiety over loss of control masks a deeper and almost irrational anxiety over the erasure of authorship. While the artist’s original creation moves from one medium to another, the fear of the author is to be left behind. This is mitigated by the familiarity the playwright might have with the technical aesthetics of film, as well as his or her specific role in the process itself. But to lose control is to lose authority; to lose authority is in turn to lose authorship. Authoritative control had an overwhelming importance for Shaw in many aspects of his life. He was by nature, as Sally Peters has pointed out, “obsessive, coercing, directing, managing.”5 This nature expressed itself perhaps in personal relationships and self-promotion, but it is also evident in Shaw’s relationship to his work. The history of the theatrical productions of Pygmalion bears this out. The English-language version of Pygmalion premiered on stage in April of 1914 and created an immediate problem for Shaw. Although the play produced something of an uproar over the use of “bloody,” it was the ending that angered the playwright. Cast in the role of Higgins was Herbert Beerbohm Tree, an actor known for his excessively exaggerated and melodramatic performances. Shaw’s original ending of the play lacked any suggestion of a romantic relationship between Higgins and Liza. Shaw, in fact, took pains to instruct the actors to avoid any such suggestion. In Shaw’s version, after Liza announces to her teacher, “I shall not see you again,” Higgins incorrigibly asks Liza to go shopping for him. His mother deftly steps in and tells her son that she herself will do his errands. The play ends with Higgins rather smugly responding, “Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy em all right enough. Goodbye.”6 Shaw clearly intended that romance should have little or no place in the relationship between student and teacher. Tree, however, true to his reputation, put his own stamp on the final scene, playing Higgins as if he were a lovesick schoolboy, going so far in future performances as to toss flowers in Liza’s path as she leaves the stage, hoping to win his flower girl back. In response to Tree’s hijacking of his play, the outraged Shaw added what he called a “sequel” for the 1916 publication of Pygmalion in which he spells out quite precisely what transpires, not only in the final scene, but in the aftermath of the play as well. He makes it unmistakably clear that marriage between Liza and Higgins is out of the question. He lambasts the need for a so-called happy ending: “The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so

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enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-medowns of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of ‘happy endings’ to misfit all stories.”7 Liza will marry not a lovesick Higgins but rather Freddie, and they will open what will eventually be a successful flower shop not far from the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington. But this would not be the end of it. When the play was revived in 1920, Shaw sent precise stage directions to the actress playing Liza, explaining that her character should leave the stage with her pride fully intact. Concurrently Higgins should walk to the balcony and declare, “Galatea!,” feeling pride that his statue has come to life. As Shaw makes clear: “He [Higgins] gets the last word; and you [Liza] get it too.”8 The history of the production of Pygmalion up until the time of the adaptation to film is informed, therefore, by the author’s relentless effort to control his property. If he cannot take the play out of the hands of directors and actors, then he can at least reclaim it for future productions. Film, as I have suggested, would put an end to this possibility.

Shaw and Ovid The earliest extant version of the Pygmalion myth is in Bk. 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Ovid places his version of Pygmalion within a cluster of tales dealing with inappropriate objects of desire. Byblis falls in love with her brother; Iphis with another woman; and Myrrha with her father. Pygmalion’s object of desire will be a statue which he himself has sculpted. He first creates the marble likeness of a woman as a reaction to the degeneracy of women. He is “horrified / At all the countless vices nature gives / To womankind.”9 Pygmalion will use his skill to create an object of desire which will necessarily remain pure and faithful. Secondarily, the artist can eliminate his own dependence on a woman. As Victor Stoichita argues, “Before constituting a replacement, the figurine must contribute to the preservation of a vow of chastity and thus constitute a protection: it is to protect himself from women that Pygmalion creates a simulacrum.”10 But against his will Pygmalion falls in love with the statue. The marble likeness, of course, cannot respond to his touch. Ironically, Pygmalion finds himself in the role of a lover who tries desperately to seduce an unresponsive woman. He brings her jewelry and silks and calls her his “darling.” Pygmalion finally prays to Venus that she might come to life. The goddess grants the artist his wish, and as he embraces the statue, it suddenly becomes warm to the touch. The important point to note in Ovid’s version is that the critical metamorphosis is not the transformation of the statue into a real woman, but that of Pygmalion from one who

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would insulate himself from women to one who would accept the risks of being in love with a living creature. Similarly, although Shaw’s version of the myth ostensibly focuses on the metamorphosis of Liza from a flower girl into a lady, it is the transformation of Higgins that takes precedence in the play. Higgins himself inadvertently announces his own status when he defends his intentions for the girl to Pickering, who reminds him that “no advantage is to be taken of her position.”11 Higgins responds that the women he teaches, however beautiful they might be, are nothing other than “blocks of wood.” But he quickly adds, “I might as well be a block of wood.”12 With Higgins it is less a question of class distinctions than one of ingrained behavior. Higgins is repeatedly chastised by the two women in his life, Mrs. Pearce and his mother. Mrs. Pearce warns Higgins not to corrupt Liza’s manners: “You really must not swear before the girl.”13 Moreover, he is told to dress in an appropriate manner: “I ask you not to come downstairs in your dressing gown.”14 Later, Higgins’s mother scolds him: “Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets. That’s a good boy.” The habits of Higgins are as much a subject of the play as the dialect of Liza. That Higgins is himself in need of metamorphosis is suggested in a poster designed for the 1914 opening of the play. Higgins looms over Liza, who kneels at his feet holding up a flower. The phonetics teacher looks upward in the pose of a statue. Pygmalion, not Galatea, is the stolid marble figure which must be brought to life.15 It is not, however, simply habits that need breaking. One suspects that Higgins has constructed his life much in the manner of Ovid’s Pygmalion. The Professor is intent on separating himself from any romantic attachment to women. The significant figures in his life are his housekeeper, his mother, and, for the purposes of the play, Pickering. The question that settles over the play is less whether Liza will become a lady than whether Higgins will become a lover. That Shaw would himself relentlessly insist that no romantic ending be attached to his work suggests more about Shaw’s own peculiarities than it does about the play. While Shaw draws upon Ovid for his representation of Higgins as the figure who requires metamorphosis, he also makes a crucial change to the earlier version. Higgins’s Galatea begins not as a lifeless block of marble waiting to be fashioned into the likeness of a beautiful woman, but as a real woman with a personal history, her own set of desires and expectations, and generally a place in the world, however unsatisfactory that might be. Higgins would transform something already warm to the touch into something cold and statuesque. How the filmmakers deal with this change will prove critical in understanding the screen adaptation.

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The film As I indicated earlier, for years Shaw was beset by producers to grant the film rights to Pygmalion. Finally, under the gentle and fawning pressure of Gabriel Pascal, Shaw did relent. Persistence, flattery, and the advent of the talking picture won him over. Pascal’s letters to Shaw during the period of contract signings, negotiations with studios, the selection of actors, and the myriad other details which are part of the adaptation process, are characterized by an almost hyperbolic idolization of “My Dearest Maestro.”16 There is evidence of this adulation at the beginning of the film itself. It is Shaw’s name that appears above the title, and in a written prologue the work is called Bernard Shaw’s “famous play.” Although ego certainly had something to do with it, the arrival of “talkies” also played a significant role in his capitulation. Shaw’s words and hence his presence could be preserved. More importantly for Shaw, he may have seen in film the possibility of guaranteeing that his version of the play would be the one that would last. He could, in short, exert final control over his work. In this case, film would be his ally, not his nemesis. It was a combination of factors, therefore, that caused Shaw to change his mind. Worn down from twenty-odd years of entreaties, he detected an opportunity for shaping a lasting version, and simply satisfied his own ego. Moreover, as Donald Costello has shown, Shaw did have some appreciation of the possibilities cinema offered. He recognized that cinema provided a temporal and spatial freedom denied to drama. But Costello also points out that Shaw “did not explore the contribution of the cinema’s destruction of time and space for the creation of a new artistic expression.”17 While Shaw understood cuts to the original script, additions of dialogue, casting, and even the creation of whole scenes in the adaptation process, he would have less understanding or interest in editing, camera angles, framing, close-ups, distance shots, and other techniques of cinema. The screen version of the play would not be, as perhaps Shaw thought it should, a recording of a theatrical production.

The opening Shaw’s play begins on the steps of St. Paul’s Church at Covent Garden. Because of its close proximity to the Royal Opera House and the Theatre Royal, it has come to be called the “Actor’s Church.” But it also adjoins the flower and produce markets of Covent Garden. The Church occupies a liminal space and draws a diverse cross-section of society to its steps. On the one hand, upper-class and educated theatre and opera patrons gather here

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2.1 Pygmalion briefly evokes working-class life with images of shabby disorder.

before and after performances; on the other hand, the denizens of the marketplace peddle their wares before its steps (Illustration 2.1). For the opening scene of Pygmalion, Shaw exploits the nature of this space to stage a collision between socio-economic classes. The collision is, in fact, literal, as Liza, a flower girl, is bowled over by Freddie, a theatre patron running off to fetch a cab for his mother and sister. The film begins quite differently. The initial shot is an extreme close-up of a bouquet of flowers. Indeed, the camera seems almost buried in the petals. The audience expects that this will be a film about blossoms, not phonetics. It is initially unclear whether the image looks ahead to a later flowering, or whether it announces a flowering that has already occurred. The question is immediately answered as the camera pulls back to reveal Liza in a medium close-up. The glowing face of Wendy Hiller makes it clear that the flower girl has by this time blossomed into a flower herself. The proximity of her face to the camera achieves an intimacy with Liza that could not be established with the same intensity on the stage. The camera has already usurped the authority of language, demanding that Liza be appraised for how she appears on screen rather than how she speaks on stage. The opening shot of Hiller hovers over the remainder of the film, continually raising the question of what might be lost in refining, or rather refashioning, this lower-class young woman. The first fifteen seconds of the film are critical in establishing the audience’s relationship to Liza. The filmmakers have immediately and indelibly underscored the change that Shaw made to Ovid’s version of the myth. This Galatea will begin not as marble but as a flower already in full blossom. The camera does not stop here, but proceeds in what will be essentially one long take before arriving at the steps of the Church. The camera follows

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Liza until she crosses paths with a figure who seems out of place in the flower market, an interloper who is observing rather than participating in the life of Covent Garden. The camera, perhaps to the immediate chagrin of the audience, leaves Liza to follow that figure whom we shall soon know as Professor Higgins. There is a good bit of distancing going on here, perhaps even irony. The phonetics scholar who scrupulously gathers data is himself under the scrutiny of the camera. Time passes, and daylight fades into night. The filmmakers now provide the audience with an extreme long shot of Higgins from an elevated camera angle. Higgins is objectified as he moves about the deserted marketplace. The audience is left wondering if Higgins will blossom into the flower that Liza has already become. The control and authority of the professor have already been subverted. While ostensibly the crossing paths of Liza and Higgins establish the expectation of their coming together later, of more significance is the likelihood that Higgins is the figure not yet warm to the touch. The first act of the film concludes with an added scene, granting an even greater degree of closeness with Liza. She leaves Covent Garden in the cab Freddie finally secured for his mother and sister. But unlike the scene from the play, which ends here, the camera follows Eliza from her arrival outside her room and then into its interior. With a series of medium close-ups, the camera moves about Liza’s private world as if it were exploring and probing its details, thereby creating a sense of intimacy not possible on the stage, where the room would be taken in as a totality. In this instance, rather than employ the camera to break down the wall which contains theatrical space, the filmmakers use it to draw the audience into its deeper recesses. The scene ends with Liza musing into a mirror. The camera is set up at an angle so that both Liza and her reflection are simultaneously available. At this moment, Liza herself becomes complicit in her transformation into a statue as she wonders how she would look as a “lady.” The audience is privy to Liza’s inner life, experiencing a flesh-and-blood creature as she contemplates herself as the work of art she might become.

Liza’s lessons Our initiation into Higgins’s world also begins with a close-up, not of flowers but of a flame lit by the Professor, casting its light into a spinning mirror. What follows is a short montage of technical devices foreshadowing the technological methods that Higgins will use in reshaping Liza. This instigates a series of purely cinematic set-pieces leading up to Liza’s appearance at the Embassy Ball. The expression on Higgins’s face is

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one of a schoolboy experimenting with a chemistry set, in love with his contraptions. But it is the face of an oscilloscope, not of Higgins, that dominates the sequence. On the soundtrack a five-note sequence mechanically repeats itself in rhythm with the beeps made by the oscilloscope. A sheet of graph paper and the face of Higgins are superimposed on the face of the instrument, suggesting that Higgins has been absorbed into a world of dehumanized mechanical gadgets. This transformation is reinforced as the image fades into a close-up of a plastic ear. The sequence ends with the camera pulling back to reveal Higgins and Pickering. As I indicated earlier, this short sequence is followed by two others in which Liza is herself placed into the world of Higgins’s scientific methods. The process of Liza’s education is charted through purely cinematic imagery. The ostensible purpose of these scenes is to compress time, but the result is to intensify the oppressive rigor of the process. A combination of quick fades, interspersed snippets of dialogue, tilted camera angles, dream images, and close-ups of faces and machines and charts contribute to a sense of the inexorable transformation of Liza (Illustration 2.2). We are in the workshop of the artist, with its repetitive and relentless exercises. The series of soft fades creates not the tension of what sharp cuts might have generated but an almost dreamlike assault. The machines are concurrently eccentric, suggesting Higgins’s own eccentricities, but also cold, suggesting his mechanical will. This invokes the modernist concern with the economic demand for productivity and the devices created to insure it. Technology

2.2 Henry Higgins (Leslie Howard) and Eliza Doolittle make an ill-assorted couple often captured in two-shots.

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becomes the tool by which the pupil is forced into linguistic conformity, in sharp contrast to the very natural absorption of one’s native language, a much less intrusive and arbitrary process than the mechanical reconfiguration of diction, cadence, tone, and accent. Liza has no real mother, but she does have a mother tongue. The audience witnesses its erasure and concludes that Higgins dehumanizes Liza more than he liberates her. The most startling shot of the second montage sequence takes place in the middle of the night, with Higgins hovering over Liza as if he were trying to extract a confession from her. The tilted camera angle and noir lighting give the scene an almost sinister quality.

The Embassy Ball Liza’s appearance at the Embassy Ball was written and shot expressly for the film adaptation. The dialogue, however (which Shaw himself wrote for the set-piece), gives way in importance to the purely visible. The camera, in short, takes over. How Liza looks, not how she speaks, constitutes the overriding factor in her coming out. Liza utters but ten words in the entire scene: “How kind of you to let me come,” “extraordinary,” and a barely audible “yes” (Illustration 2.3). The camera moves with few cuts smoothly from group to group as guests comment on what they see. Liza becomes a spectacle, the object at which everyone gazes. Moreover, the particular quality of her appearance is essential to understanding the relationship between Higgins and his pupil. The scene begins with Liza entering the foyer of the Embassy and then pausing between two pillars framed in portraiture. The camera moves

2.3 Showing off her now proper pronunciation of “h’s,” Eliza is still uncomfortable in “respectable” society.

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toward Liza as if it were naturally drawn to her face. She majestically turns in profile and utters the aforementioned “yes” to Higgins’s question, “Are you ready?” Cut from the script is Shaw’s more extended response of Liza to Pickering’s encouragement: “I have done this fifty times . . . hundreds of times . . . in my day-dreams.” But the filmmakers want the audience to watch Liza, not to hear her speak. The stage directions indicate that she walk “like a somnambulist.” In the film, however, she is less asleep, less in a dream, than she is a finely fashioned piece of marble. For her to become this work of art, her own identity must be repressed. She has become a non-person, statuesque in her manner, robotic in her movements, the final product of Higgins’s tutelage. As indicated earlier, Liza has begun not as a block of marble but as a living creature. That life is now buried under a marble façade. The audience is bound to wonder if Higgins will fall in love with the cool perfection of the statue he has fashioned now on display at the Ball or the flesh-and-blood woman she had been prior to her transformation. It is not a question of a statue coming to life but rather of one returning to life.

The ending As I pointed out previously, the ending of Pygmalion has been a point of contention ever since its first performance in 1914. Shaw was constantly at work trying to eliminate any suggestion of a romantic relationship between Liza and Higgins. This involvement continued with the possibility of a screen adaptation. In a 1934 treatment, Shaw proposed yet another scenario. From the balcony, Higgins sees Liza and Freddie kissing and shakes his fist at the couple. Liza “cocks a snoot” at Higgins, and Freddie tips his hat “in the Chaplin manner.”18 Four years later, after he had been convinced by Pascal to allow him to make a film, Shaw added to a variation on his 1920 “sequel.” Freddie has married Liza, and they are to be seen in their South Kensington flower shop “full of fashionable customers,” with Liza “behind the counter, serving in great splendor.”19 Unknown to Shaw, however, Pascal had shot his own ending. Liza does go off with Freddie, but then at the close of the film she returns to Higgins’s study. The Professor seems as arrogant as ever, ordering Liza with his back turned to fetch him his slippers. The implication is that Liza complies and that she has returned to take her place as Higgins’s helpmate. Liza has not become the statuesque figure she had been at the ball nor the spirited flower girl she had been at the beginning of the film. The flesh-and-blood Liza has apparently been fashioned not into a marble Galatea but instead into a

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complacent piece of statuary. She will, as Pascal’s wife put it many years later, be “running for those slippers to the end of her days.”20 To dismiss the ending of the film as a disappointingly anti-feminist statement does the film a disservice. The film is finally neither excessively romantic nor narrowly ideological. Its final two scenes establish a much more sophisticated relationship between Liza and Higgins than has been recognized. In the first of these two scenes, Liza has returned for one final confrontation with Higgins. When Higgins instinctually and annoyingly corrects a small slip in Liza’s grammar, she defiantly declares, “you are not my teacher now.” This deflating comment is followed by an extreme closeup of Higgins, who rather wistfully smiles to himself. The audience is granted a much more intimate access to Higgins than could have been achieved on the stage. The expression on his face reveals a Higgins who is not so cold and rigid after all. He recognizes that his work of art has come to life and that Liza no longer requires a teacher. This approximates the ending Shaw had devised for an earlier treatment, in which Pygmalion and Galatea would leave the play each in possession of his and her pride. But the look on Higgins’s face, as I suggested, is a wistful one. Higgins’s pride may be preserved, but he also senses that he is about to lose something more than a student. The scene continues with Liza vehemently asserting, “I will marry Freddie,” and then, after she has declared that she herself will be a teacher in order to support her husband, with a final, “Goodbye, Professor Higgins,” she dashes out. Higgins rushes to the window and sees Liza hop into Freddie’s car, and off they go. What follows is neither the 1920 version in which Higgins triumphantly exclaims “Galatea,” nor the 1934 screen treatment, in which Higgins shakes his fist and Liza “cocks a snoot.” Nor does the film move to the flower shop in South Kensington, which could easily have been accomplished on screen. Instead, the film follows Higgins through the streets of London as he frantically searches for Liza. The clear meaning is that Higgins desperately wants her back. Higgins has been removed from the confined comfort of his insulated laboratory. Nor is he any longer the linguist meandering through the streets of London gathering data for his research as he was at the beginning of the film. He has been absorbed into the world in a way that he had not imagined, a way in which anyone who has ever been in love will easily understand. When he returns empty-handed to his study, Higgins inadvertently switches on the phonograph recording of Liza’s voice. He next turns it off and holds his head in his hands, clearly bemoaning his loss. But then Liza’s real voice takes the place of the recorded voice, almost as if something

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inanimate had returned to life. Higgins turns and looks at her with surprise and relief, but then catching himself, he turns away and asks in the final shot of the film, “Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza.” The important gesture is the “catching of himself,” as if he needed to prevent displaying any weakness to Liza or to the female sex in general. There is no way to provide any sort of proof of what transpires in this final moment. The scene is shot in such a way as to demand interpretation and invites the viewer to bring his or her own set of expectations. Response to any work of art depends to a certain extent on the experiences and beliefs of the interpreter. The ending of Pygmalion sets a trap, however, for those with pre-conceived notions. It is easy to miss the playfulness of this short exchange between Liza and Higgins. Higgins finally demonstrates a characteristic that he has lacked throughout: a sense of self-irony. His “catching of himself” is a theatrical gesture intended for Liza. Theirs will not be a relationship predicated on hierarchies of rigid gender and/or class distinctions. Liza remains as likely to fetch Higgins his slippers as she is to throw them at him. There is certainly nothing to preclude the latter. However, she will not throw them from anger, but rather from a playful sense of irony. The center around which their relationship will revolve is not proper grammar but playful banter. There is very little onscreen physical chemistry between Howard and Hiller, and hence between Higgins and Liza, but there is a chemistry of teasing contention. It is something that screwball comedy does so well. James Harvey has pointed out that for the screwball couple there is a “sardonic appreciation of one another.”21 Although Higgins and Liza are no Nick and Nora Charles, nor are they capable of an American style of wisecracking which we associate with screwball comedy, we sense at the end of the film that they have discovered a space where verbal sparring has become a sign of affection. Liza and Higgins are a perfect match because they are so well suited for one another. This ending elevates the film adaptation to a level which Shaw could not have achieved. In matters of love, as his insistence on the marriage between Freddie and Liza attests, Shaw fell woefully short. The film ultimately defies the didactic Shaw in the same way that Liza at the end of the film defies her own teacher. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4.

Bernard Shaw, Table Talk (New York: Harpers, 1924): 53. Ibid., 45. Ibid., 53. R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray, Hollywood’s Tennessee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009): 25.

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5. Sally Peters, “Shaw’s Life: A Feminist in Spite of Himself,” in The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, ed. Christopher Innes (Cambridge University Press, 1998): 3. 6. Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion, ed. L. W. Conolly (London: Methuen Drama, 2008): 146. 7. Ibid., 129. 8. Ibid., 147. 9. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. A. D. Melville (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 232. 10. Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect, trans. Alison Anderson (University of Chicago Press, 2008): 13. 11. Shaw, Pygmalion: 2.689. 12. Ibid., 2.694. 13. Ibid., 2.721. 14. Ibid., 2.769. 15. Michael Holroyd, Bernard Shaw, vol. ii (New York: Random House, 1989): 310. 16. Gabriel Pascal and Bernard Shaw, Selected Correspondence, ed. Bernard F. Dukore (Toronto University Press, 1996): 10. 17. Donald P. Costello, The Serpent’s Eye (Notre Dame University Press, 1965): 17. 18. Shaw, Pygmalion: 149. 19. Ibid., 151. 20. L. W. Conolly, Introduction to Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw (London: Methuen Drama, 2008): xxviii. 21. James Harvey, Romantic Comedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987): 124.

chapter 3

Knowing your place: David Lean’s film adaptation of Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed Neil Sinyard

By the time of the first release of This Happy Breed in 1944, Noël Coward was not only a hugely popular playwright and composer but something of a national institution (Illustration 3.1). Indeed, the film at that time was never simply called This Happy Breed. On all the posters, press brochures, and even the credit titles, it was “Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed,” his producer credit even appearing after that of the director rather than (as is the customary practice) before, and the music score almost immediately alluding to his popular 1941 song “London Pride.” The impression given was that, to all intents and purposes, this was a Noël Coward film, which was true up to a point – but it does not tell the whole story. Coward’s theatrical rise had been meteoric. In his twenties, he had experienced sensational success as performer and writer in his plays The Vortex (1923) and Hay Fever (1924), and this had continued with such plays as Private Lives (1930) and Cavalcade (1931), the film version of which had won the Oscar for the best film of 1933. The astringent wit and satire evident in his plays had been used to equally sparkling effect in his musical compositions, so that songs such as “A Room with a View,” “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” and “Mad about the Boy” had rapidly become classics. Curiously, however, Coward had shown no inclination to augment his celebrity with a screen career, for he loved the contact with an audience that the theatrical stage could offer him but the sound-stage of a film studio could not. His screen debut had been a fleeting appearance as a teenage barrow-boy in D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1917). Prior to the 1940s, his most significant screen performance had been in an unusual arty film that drifts toward surrealism, The Scoundrel (1935), written and directed by the celebrated team of Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur, in which Coward played a publisher despised by his authors. It had won an Oscar for its screen story and has become something of a cult film. One of its most interesting features had been its use of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto over the 44

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3.1 Noël Coward.

soundtrack. Was this the inspiration for its unforgettable accompaniment to the most celebrated of all Coward adaptations for the screen, David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945)? Coward’s biggest cinematic triumph was to be his wartime tribute to the Royal Navy, In Which We Serve (1942), which he wrote and co-directed as well as starred in as Naval Captain Kinross, a role heavily modeled on Coward’s friend Lord Mountbatten. The film was voted the best of its year by the New York critics and won Coward a special Oscar “for his outstanding production achievement.” However, as his diary entry of September 25, 1942 indicates, at the time he was even more delighted that the critical and commercial triumph had, as he put it, “spiked the guns” of his enemies, among whom he listed “Max Beaverbrook, the Express, Graham Greene.”1 Coward was still smarting over Greene’s critical hostility to him – he was even to write a poem about it, rhyming “Greene” with “spleen,” for example – as well as Greene’s dismissal of Coward’s latest theatrical success, Blithe Spirit (1941). The Express newspapers had long waged war on Coward for his supposed champagne-and-caviar lifestyle, and the film’s droll response was an ironic shot of an old copy of the Daily Express floating in the water, with its infamous headline “There Will Be No War,” followed by a cut to a sea battle and the laconic title “Crete, May 23, 1941.” The implied rebuke of the Express paper for its policy of appeasement

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and its distinctly limited powers of prophecy enraged its proprietor, Lord Beaverbrook, who tried to have the film suppressed, in much the same way as the American newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst tried to suppress Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941). Yet, for all the film’s plaudits for Coward, it still did not endear the filmmaking process to him, and he was shrewd enough to recognize that much of the credit should go to the technical crew he had assembled. Bored with the technicalities of filming and instead concentrating on the actors, he had essentially handed over the directing reins to a new director, David Lean, who had been establishing a reputation as the best film editor in England by virtue of his work on such films as Pygmalion (1938), The 49th Parallel (1941), and One of our Aircraft is Missing (1942). Lean had been recommended to Coward by one of Britain’s finest directors of that time, Carol Reed, who, when he and Lean were to become friendly rivals, was later to reflect good-humouredly to John Mills that “it was about the silliest bloody suggestion I ever made in my life.”2 As well as Lean’s contribution, Coward particularly appreciated the work of associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and cameraman Ronald Neame. When the three of them formed a new production company under the name of Cineguild, in association with Coward’s Two Cities film company, Coward gave the team full approval to film any of his work, and Cineguild’s production career was launched with the adaptation of This Happy Breed in 1944. It was to be followed by Blithe Spirit (1945), and then the most famous of them all, Brief Encounter, based on Coward’s one-act play, Still Life, from Tonight at 8.30. The team was then to make the decision to move away from Coward, and, as Ronald Neame put it, “try our own wings.”3 Nevertheless, the Coward association was immensely important in getting the company and its team off to an auspicious start. Although not produced until 1942, the play of This Happy Breed had been written in 1939 with the shadow of an impending Second World War hanging over it; in some ways, one could see In Which We Serve as a continuation of the themes of class, continuity, and Englishness that the play debates. Whereas Coward’s earlier play Cavalcade had followed the fortunes of an upper-middle-class family and their servants from the Boer War to the First World War, This Happy Breed covers the period from the Armistice in 1918 to the Munich crisis of 1938. When the film came out in 1944, it was to be described in its advertising tag-line as “a human, happy cavalcade of family life.” The family in question is that of the Gibbons, a supposedly typical lower-middle-class suburban family in London who have just moved into

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3.2 Lean’s camera locates the Gibbons family socially and geographically through a series of aerial shots that eventually zoom into a semi-detached villa in the respectable working-class London neighborhood of Clapham.

their new home of Number 17, Sycamore Road, Clapham Common (Illustration 3.2). The father is Frank Gibbons, who has recently returned from the war to his wife, Ethel, and his three children, Reg, Queenie, and Vi. Also in the household are Frank’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Flint, his widowed sister, Sylvia, and the cat, Percy. Against the background of the turbulent social and political events of the following twenty years – including the General Strike, the Depression, the death of King George V, the Abdication of Edward VIII, the Munich crisis, and the threat of another war – we follow the fortunes of the family. Reg will fall out with his father over the General Strike; he supports the strikers, but his father will continue working at his job at a travel agent’s. At the end of the Strike, father and son will be reconciled; however, shortly after his marriage, Reg and his wife will be killed in a car crash. Reg’s friend, Sam, who during the period of the General Strike has been a Communist firebrand, will be tamed and domesticated through his marriage to Vi. Queenie, who has been frustrated and dissatisfied with her suburban lot, runs off to Europe with a married man. However, she will return after a few years, chastened, and marry the sailor boy-next-door, Billy, who is the son of Frank’s best friend and who has always loved her. Through thick and thin, Frank and Ethel stick together. As Sheridan Morley argued in his biography of Coward, A Talent to Amuse, “the ultimate heroine of the play is England herself.”4 At particular points in the drama, Frank is given to making grandiose statements about the national character that Coward clearly believed and intended us to endorse. For example, when his son Reg is becoming politicized by Sam

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and agitating for social change, Frank gives his opinion to Ethel about what she has called this “down with everything business,” which the film reproduces faithfully: Where they go wrong is trying to get things done too quickly. We don’t like things done too quickly in this country. It’s like gardening . . . we’re used to planting things and watching them grow . . . think what a mess there’d be if all the flowers and vegetables came popping up all in a minute – that’s what all these social reformers are trying to do, trying to alter the way of things all at once.

In the final act of the play, Frank will deliver a similar speech about the English people and the common man to his baby grandson in his pram. “You belong to a race that’s been bossy for years,” he tells him, and the reason it’s held on as long as it has is that nine times out of ten it’s behaved decently and treated people right . . . the ordinary people, like you and me, know something better than all the fussy old politicians put together – we know what we belong to, where we come from, and where we’re going. We may not know it with our brains, but we know it with our roots.

However, as we shall see, this speech was to prove unacceptable to the filmmakers. The play was first performed on a twenty-eight-week provincial tour, beginning in Blackpool, where it was part of a Noël Coward program entitled “Play Parade.” It was performed in tandem with productions of Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit and was well received. “Played to a good house apparently in the last stages of consumption,” noted Coward laconically in his diary entry of December 7, 1942.5 It premiered in the West End at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on April 30, 1943 and ran for thirty-eight performances. The cast was an interesting one. Noël Coward played Frank, inevitably; Judy Campbell was Ethel; and a Coward favorite, Joyce Carey, who was the unforgettable “refained” manageress of the station buffet bar in Brief Encounter, played Aunt Sylvia. On stage, the part of Sam Leadbitter was played by Dennis Price, whereas Sam is played in the film by Guy Verner, who was unable to give the character much charisma; and the boy-next-door Billy (sensitively portrayed in the film by John Mills) was played by James Donald, who had had a small role in In Which We Serve and was to appear to tremendous effect in a later David Lean film as the Doctor in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The film went into production almost simultaneously with the West End premiere and was comprehensively re-cast.

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Although he was given a strong intimation that Coward was interested in repeating his stage performance as Frank Gibbons on screen, David Lean resisted the hint. He felt Coward would not make a convincing lower-middle-class character on screen and privately confessed that he was not that impressed with him as a straight dramatic actor either (he felt light comedy was Coward’s forte). Among Coward’s letters, there is a curious note to his close theatrical friends the Lunts (the legendary Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne), where he mentions that “his” Film Unit was making a Technicolor version of This Happy Breed “with Robert Donat and Johnny Mills and it looks as though it might be good” (February 1, 1943). The reference to Robert Donat (rather than Robert Newton, who had actually been cast) seems something of a Freudian slip. In fact, Donat had been offered the role of Frank but had turned it down, and in a characteristically courteous but honest letter to Coward (April 24, 1942), he had given the reason: Frank’s last speech to his grandson. “I don’t believe in the things that Frank believes in,” Donat wrote. “He’s human and lovable . . . until he tries to justify himself and his kind; then I’m mad with him. Rightly or wrongly, I believe it is just that very political irresponsibility that got us into another war.”6 The irony is that, initially at the suggestion of David Lean’s wife at the time, Kay Walsh (who was playing Queenie in the film), and over Coward’s strenuous objections, the offending speech was to be cut entirely from the final film. Kay Walsh said she thought that the little grandchild would have leapt up from his pram and shouted “Rubbish!”7 Lean supported the casting of Robert Newton as Frank. He had directed Newton’s scenes as the money-grubbing slum-dweller in Major Barbara (1941) and had been very taken with his performance. The problem with Newton was his alcoholism. Accordingly, a clause was inserted in his contract that he would forfeit £500 of his salary (which was £9,000) for every occasion on which production was delayed because of his drinking. In the event, he seems mostly to have behaved himself, apart from insulting Noël Coward at a party, being arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Haymarket, and going on a bender during the last week of shooting, from which he was rescued by John Mills, who managed to conceal him from discovery and sober him up.8 A grateful Newton subsequently rewarded Mills with a bottle of champagne. Lean was rewarded with a performance that was brisk, sensitive, and, above all, unsentimental. In Lean’s eyes, sentimentality in movies was the cardinal sin: Katharine Hepburn was to say that there was not a sentimental bone in his entire body.9 Strange to think that in this film Newton plays Kay Walsh’s father, who threatens to give her “the hiding of her life” when he learns she has run off with a married

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man. He will later play Bill Sikes to Kay Walsh’s Nancy in Lean’s magnificent film of Oliver Twist (1948), where Newton is truly terrifying when he learns of Nancy’s treachery to his criminal confederates and bludgeons her to death. The remainder of the cast was partly made up from the team who had served him so well in In Which We Serve: John Mills, Celia Johnson, and Kay Walsh. The female performances in the film are especially noteworthy. Coward thought that in general the characters were well drawn, but he had a particular fondness for Aunt Sylvia and Granny, whose constant antagonism and idiosyncratic exchanges (“It’s a French postcard”; “Disgusting”) provide some of the richest humor in the film, expertly delivered by Alison Leggatt and Amy Veness. Although Celia Johnson was unhappy with her performance as Ethel – “I looked so awful,” she said, “that even a friend who came with me couldn’t think of anything to say except that I was meant to look drab and certainly succeeded”10 – Lean and Coward were delighted with her. She had the capacity to switch into the mood of a scene at a moment’s notice, and she gives real weight to those powerful moments of emotion when she hears of her son’s death or of her daughter’s desertion (when Frank says to her during that scene that “you’re as hard as nails,” this is certainly conveyed in Celia Johnson’s closeup: her face is as black as thunder). “Often she looks awful,” wrote the distinguished critic, C. A. Lejeune in her Observer review (May 28, 1944), “but . . . as an actress she is superb . . . This is beautiful acting; the sort of acting that the French have been taught to understand; confessional acting from the inside outwards.”11 Celia Johnson was to go on to give the performance of a lifetime in Brief Encounter, arguably the most heartbreaking piece of acting ever in British cinema. However, perhaps it is Kay Walsh as Queenie who gives the performance that has stood the test of time better than anyone else’s in the film. She is superb, and her co-star John Mills was particularly complimentary about the reality that she brought to their scenes together. She plays the first of David Lean’s erring heroines – there are to be quite a number in his subsequent films – who suspects there must be more to life than the delights of suburbia and what the publicity brochure called “her natural destiny” to marry Billy. Although she will return sheepishly to the fold, she still seems the most vital and modern character of the film, with a more adventurous and exploratory attitude to life than anyone else and a refusal to settle unthinkingly into the role expected of her by her family and by society. When Brian McFarlane asked Kay Walsh in an interview if she sympathized with Queenie’s desire to kick over the traces, she replied: “The only

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difference between Queenie and me was that I would never have given in, never have gone back home.”12 Given the essentially interior nature of the subject matter, one of the most surprising aspects of the film was the decision to make it in color, whose usage at that time was more often associated with fantasy and adventure films. It is all the more striking when one thinks that, of Lean’s ten films up to and including Hobson’s Choice (1954), only this and Blithe Spirit are in color. In their book, David Lean and His Films, Alain Silver and James Ursini have argued that “it was industrial policy to restrict colour to theatrical material when studio photography would predominate.”13 The argument for it by producer Anthony Havelock-Allan was that it elevated the status of the picture: otherwise, he thought, it would seem “a small, grey play about a small English family that would look like a small film.”14 Subtlety was the watchword. Ronald Neame said the aim was to take the glory out of Technicolor and use color in a new way, making the tones seem drab rather than bright.15 In this the film certainly succeeded, some critics later claiming they had not noticed the film was in color at all. Lean even went to the trouble of having the walls of the house sprayed with gray paint so as to give it a subdued look in keeping with the film’s restraint and realism. The other main problem was trying to create a pre-war London while the country was still at war. Neame had some difficulty in persuading local residents to remove tape from their windows in his effort to recreate pre-war period authenticity. When asked on the 1985 South Bank Show documentary devoted to his work what had first attracted him to the cinema, David Lean replied: “I’d meet characters on the screen that I’d never meet in my ordinary dull suburban life.” It seems ironic, then, that his first solo film as director should be about the suburban life he went to the cinema to avoid, and where the concept of “ordinary” is offered explicitly as a positive by the head of the family, Frank, when he thinks Queenie is getting ideas above her station. Perhaps because of this, and Coward’s lengthy shadow across the material, Lean tended to speak rather apologetically of his work on this film. Certainly he had limited room for manoeuver, and the predominance of interiors is in striking contrast to the imposing vistas of later works such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965). Yet his transformation of theatrical space into cinematic space is often highly imaginative; claustrophobic when appropriate, but dynamic, too, when it needs to be. In this he was probably influenced and inspired by the director whom Kevin Brownlow described in his magisterial biography of Lean as Lean’s “hero,” William Wyler, whose film adaptations of stage plays such as Dead End (1937), The

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Letter (1940), and particularly The Little Foxes (1941) displayed a mastery at molding theatrical material into mesmerising cinema.16 What opportunities there were for opening out the play were skillfully taken. A high-angle shot spectacularly introduces the scene of the Victory Parade that celebrates the end of the war. There is a spirited reconstruction of the Wembley Exhibition of 1924, which Lean could remember attending as a school treat. A brief scene at a dance hall shows Queenie at the local Palais winning a competition for performing the new dance craze, the Charleston, evidence of her embrace of the new fashions of the time and of her extroverted nature in contrast to that of her dependable sister, Vi (Eileen Erskine). A scene where the family goes to see an early talkie, M-G-M’s Broadway Melody of 1929, is very funny: Sam comments that, for all the wonder of sound, “I can’t understand a word they say,” to which Vi replies: “No, but it’s marvellous, isn’t it?” Shots of wireless aerials silhouetted against the sky concisely convey the impression of a whole nation united in mourning as they listen to the news of King George V’s impending death. We see Frank and Ethel amid the crowds filing past the king’s coffin in Westminster Hall. There is a close-up of the crown; and then sounds of wireless oscillations jump us forward a few months: a shot of Ethel’s taking down the calendar with King Edward VIII’s picture on it even before the end of the year marks the fact that they have just been listening to his Abdication speech, and, as royalists, disapprove. (Coward had always wanted to include part of the Abdication speech in productions of his play, as he thought it was such an important moment in the nation’s collective memory, but he was forbidden to do so by the theatrical censor, the Lord Chamberlain, and the ban clearly extended to the film also.) Also included are shots of the celebrations following Neville Chamberlain’s return from Munich promising “Peace in our Time,” which give an added frisson to Frank’s argument with Sylvia about what he sees as ignoble appeasement. Yet it is not so much the opening out that impresses as the way Lean sustains visual interest even within his confined setting, and, as Wyler always did, he shows an unerring sense of where the maximum tension is to be found within a scene. Sometimes a scene is given an added dimension simply by shifting the setting. Frank’s awkward advice on the facts of life to his son Reg on his wedding day has been moved from the parlor in the play to the bathroom in the film, which gives a greater intimacy. A mirror shot conveys a sense of “like father, like son” as Frank, one feels, even as he speaks, is remembering his own wedding day as he offers his counsel to the succeeding generation. It might even be a fleeting homage to a great scene

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between father and son in front of a mirror in Wyler’s The Little Foxes; though whereas Wyler uses the image to express their deviousness (not looking each other directly in the eye but at the reflection), Lean uses it to express the father’s initial embarrassment. At other moments it is the use of the camera that is striking. When Ethel is waiting tensely for news of her son during the turbulence of the General Strike, the front door-bell rings, and the camera tracks forward urgently behind Ethel to emphasize her anxiety as she hurries to the door for news. A precisely calculated low-angle shot during a superbly funny scene when they are waiting for Reg’s wedding car to arrive gives an impression of the apprehension hanging in the air and the topsy-turvy tensions in the room that will shortly erupt into a row between Aunt Sylvia and Mrs. Flint. One could multiply instances of this kind of thing, but two examples stand out. Queenie’s surreptitious departure from home to run off with her married lover is prefaced by a fade to black, a shot of pouring rain, an upstairs door opening, and a shadowy figure descending the stairs, going to the mantelpiece to leave a letter, and then leaving the room. Explanation is delayed as Frank and his next-door neighbour Bob (Stanley Holloway) enter, slightly the worse for wear after drinking at the regimental dinner; Ethel breaks up the revelry and shoos Bob away; only then does she discover Queenie’s letter of farewell. After a tense exchange between her and Frank, during which Ethel essentially dissociates herself from any future contact with her daughter, the scene closes, with the father alone, seated at the table with his head in his hands. The camera tracks slowly backward and upward away from the living-room through the French windows and into the garden, picking up the sound of the lashing rain and the howling wind.

3.3 Neighbor and war buddy Bob Mitchell (Stanley Holloway) is here framed by Frank Gibbons (Robert Newton) and wife Ethel (Celia Johnson).

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The overall design of the sequence has some similarity to a marvellous scene in Wyler’s film of Wuthering Heights (1939), when Heathcliff’s unexpected return causes consternation in the household at Thrushcross Grange, and his departure from the scene is marked by the camera’s pulling away from the window into a stormy night that seems to be echoing the turbulence he has caused. In Lean’s case that final camera movement gives an elegant symmetry to the whole sequence and is also an eloquent use of pathetic fallacy to suggest the father’s inner turmoil and distress. The other example is the scene in which Vi rushes in with news of the death of Reg and his wife in a car accident. After ushering a distressed Granny and Aunt Sylvia out of the room, she has to go into the garden to break the news to her parents. The actual revelation is not shown. The camera simply tracks slowly from left to right across the room, allowing us to see more of the garden and increasing the tension of the scene as we await the appearance of Frank and Ethel reeling from the impact of the news. When they do appear, no words are spoken, nor does the camera move any closer: the weight of their grief is conveyed by the slowness of their movements, the expression on their faces, and the gentle way Frank helps Ethel into her chair. (Lean marveled at Celia Johnson’s acting here: moments before the take and much to his annoyance, she had been joking with other members of the cast, and he thought she could not possibly be in the right mood for the scene, but when she comes into the room, he was moved to tears by her performance.) What is particularly striking, though, is the sound of the radio playing dance music, an incongruously cheerful accompaniment to the tragedy. In the play at this point, the music is playing “softly”; in the film, by contrast, it is quite loud. Nothing suggests the grief of the family more powerfully than the fact that nobody thinks to switch the music off: it is as if they are all in a state of shock so deep that nobody hears it. It is a wonderful use of counterpoint between sound and image, similar in concept to a great moment in the finale of Bruckner’s Third Symphony, where a polka is suddenly juxtaposed with a solemn chorale theme to represent the fun and joy of the world side by side with its sadness and pain. And it is only afterward that one appreciates the retrospective poignancy of Aunt Sylvia’s petulant remark earlier in the scene when the wireless is getting on her nerves: “Ethel’d have it playing all day just because Reg gave it to her.” It is worth drawing attention also to the majestic way the film opens and closes. Lean wanted an opening shot to suggest the London of 1919, which was difficult because of the war damage. He solved the problem by hauling the Technicolor cameras to the top of a gasometer in Battersea to give

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a panoramic view of the city over the voice of Laurence Olivier’s opening narration: “After four long years of war the men are coming home. Hundreds and hundreds of houses are becoming homes once more.”17 (Lean might also have been cannily aware of the propaganda value of such a shot: London does not seem so badly damaged after all.) From a high-angle shot of the city, the camera pans left to right over the rooftops before moving in closer to a long shot of Number 17 Sycamore Road. A medium long shot of the bathroom window is followed by a close shot as the camera moves slowly forward into the bathroom and onto the landing beyond, craning down the stairs through the hall to the front door, where shadows appear on the glass panels and Frank enters, to be shortly followed by Ethel. It is a virtuoso opening, perhaps inspired by the opening of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which Lean greatly admired and whose intricate flashback narrative structure had influenced In Which We Serve. Lean emphasizes the reverberation as the family first enters, as if marking the impression they will make on their surroundings, just as he will emphasize what he will call on the shooting script a “hollow effect on the footsteps and the dialogue” when they leave the house for the last time at the end and the camera exactly reverses its opening movement to bring the film to a rounded and satisfying conclusion. With Frank’s long speech to his grandson in the pram having been cut, the film now closes with a moment of humorous yet moving diminuendo, as Frank’s declaration of love to Ethel, “I don’t mind how many flats we move into or where we go or what we do, as long as I’ve got you. . .” is met by Ethel’s “Don’t talk so silly. . .,” which is the last line of the film. That reminds me irresistibly of Shirley MacLaine’s famous response, “Shut up and deal” in answer to Jack Lemmon’s declaration of love at the end of Billy Wilder’s sublime social comedy, The Apartment (1960); and if that might seem an incongruous comparison, I would add that Wilder’s films are studded with allusions and homage to the films of David Lean, a director whom Wilder regarded as an absolute master. By some margin, This Happy Breed was the top British money-maker at the box office in the UK in 1944, being exceeded only by Sam Wood’s tedious film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and even beating the two top box-office attractions in the US for that year, Going My Way and The Song of Bernadette. Curiously, the film was not released in America until 1947, after David Lean had in the previous year become the first British director ever to be nominated for an Oscar for his work on Brief Encounter. The critical response in the UK was mostly very favorable. Two of the most prestigious English critics of the day, C. A. Lejeune and Richard Winnington,

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were full of praise. Winnington particularly admired the film’s unusual attention to small domestic detail and added: “To those who believe fervently in the British cinema, the three young men who made the picture [he was referring to Lean, Havelock-Allan, and Neame] are a confirmation and a hope.”18 Having lauded Celia Johnson’s performance, Lejeune also paid tribute to the film’s “special talent that is so quiet that it hardly becomes manifest. It appears to record drab, physical facts from the outside, while actually indicating a mute spiritual experience from within.”19 It was Dilys Powell in The Sunday Times (May 28, 1944) who raised the most substantial objections. “The suburban family in their suburban house are presented with warmth and sympathy,” she wrote, “but is the sympathy too resolute? Should not the observation be a trifle less benevolent, the defence of the ordinary man a trifle less condescending?”20 The charge of condescension toward his lower-class characters has been a recurrent critical refrain against Coward’s work, both on stage and film. Some have felt he secretly despised his “happy breed” and that his work was snobbish and class-ridden as a result. In The British Theatre Yearbook of 1946, Peter Noble launched a stinging attack on the play of This Happy Breed, claiming that “Mr Coward does not understand the working-class and in any case he dislikes them intensely . . . [Coward] stood for all the things the war has brought to an end.”21 Such criticism undoubtedly weighed heavily on the author, and when the play was published in the fourth volume of his Play Parade in 1954, Coward wrote an introduction that attempted to counter those attacks: clearly his comments are relevant to the characterization in the film also. He entirely rejected the charge that his attitude to his suburbanite Londoners was patronising. “Having been born in Teddington and having lived respectively at Sutton, Battersea Park and Clapham Common during all my formative years,” he wrote, “I can confidently assert that I know more about the hearts and minds of South Londoners than they [i.e. the critics] give me credit for.”22 He did acknowledge that the character of Frank Gibbons might have been “a fraction more than life-size” and perhaps too articulate, although he thought that was more a consequence of the nature of the medium than a miscalculation: a character has to speak his thoughts on stage, whereas in a novel they can be recorded on the page but remain unspoken. Nevertheless, he repeated his belief that none of the characters was written with the “faintest patronage” but with “sincerity, affection and the inherent understanding that is the result of personal experience.”23 In his own defense at the time, Coward might simply have cited the film’s tremendous popularity. If he were so condescending and out of touch

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about the English, why had the film been so successful in his native country? C. A. Lejeune commented that “no film in my memory has brought in more letters of appreciation.”24 It had clearly struck a chord with contemporary audiences; the matter of interest was to consider exactly what chord had been struck. The title is Shakespearean: “this happy breed” is a phrase from John of Gaunt’s paean of praise to England in Act Two, Scene 1 (line 40) of Richard II. Intriguingly, the same speech provides the title of another popular British film of the time, Anthony Asquith’s The Demi-Paradise (1943), which also extols the virtues of the English as seen through the eyes of a visiting Russian, played by Laurence Olivier. It was Olivier himself who was to project the full Shakespearean grandeur of the English nation in the first great British Shakespearean film, Henry V (1944), never more so than in his Saint Crispin’s Day speech about “we happy few,” “we band of brothers” who become equal in their common purpose of defeating an enemy. All three films are celebrations of England and Englishness at a time of war when the future of the nation is under threat and the nation’s entire way of life is being challenged. If one were to summarize the theme of the play in a phrase, one could say it is about “knowing your place” – not only in the sense of appreciating your country of birth, but in a class sense and in a domestic sense as well. It is about what Coward perceives as the indomitable spirit of the English, but also about the unchanging nature, as he saw it, of the English character and of the structure of English society. The pressbook released to accompany the film contained a glowing description of the absolute typicality of the Gibbons family: “They are as typical of London as fog, the Serpentine, crocuses in the park, Blackfriars Bridge, Big Ben, daffodils in the spring, and muffins in the winter.” It went on: Their kind survive major wars . . . Hitler, strikes, political upheavals . . . and “isms” of all kinds. You will always find them behind their sedate lace curtains, touched with the penetrating London dust; and their souls are sedate and sturdy and unconquerable – full of honour and wisdom. They go on with England, and because of such as these, England goes on.25

That is not dissimilar in style and sentiment to the speech Frank makes to his grandson that the film (perhaps wisely) decided to cut. Lean’s decision to cut the speech might partly have been simply because of its length: it would have made the ending too drawn-out. Much later in his career he was to lament taking too long over the ending of A Passage to India (1984), which he thought, in retrospect, would have been stronger if he had wrapped things up more quickly after the trial. Although Ronald Neame wanted the speech retained, apparently because he wanted

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his son Christopher to be in the pram, both Kay Walsh and Anthony Havelock-Allan wanted the speech eliminated altogether. They thought it struck a false note and was now anachronistic. In a broadcast to the Australian nation in 1940, Coward had said: “There is one thing I do know . . . and that is the spirit of the ordinary people of England: steadfast humour in the face of continual strain and horror, courage, determination and a quality of endurance that is beyond praise and almost beyond belief.”26 But by 1944, in an essay entitled “The English People” and written in the same month as the opening of the film of This Happy Breed, that astute social commentator George Orwell listed what he saw as the “salient characteristics of the English common people” in rather more robust, down-to-earth terms: “artistic insensibility, gentleness, respect for legality, suspicion of foreigners, sentimentality about animals, hypocrisy, exaggerated class distinctions and an obsession with sport.”27 Orwell’s conclusion to his essay was quite different from Coward’s advocacy of the social status quo. “England can only fulfil its special mission,” Orwell wrote, “if the ordinary English in the street can somehow get their hands on power.”28 He was more accurately reflecting the mood of a nation that was to sweep a Labour Government into power in 1945 with a commitment to change, full employment, and the Welfare State. An English audience of 1944, sensing a new social order after the war, might have found Coward’s 1939 sermon on the essential qualities of the English character a little hard to swallow in its conservative and backward-looking sentiments. What an audience could respond to and relish in the film, however (as audiences still can today), was its affectionate recreation of the recent past; its evocation of a vanishing world; consummate storytelling craftsmanship; finely judged performances; and Coward’s polished and occasionally poignant depiction of the trials and tribulations, pains and pleasures, of family life as experienced in some measure in every family generation, and of whatever social standing. (Coward even pulls off a rueful mother-in-law joke when Frank is commiserating with Ethel about her living with her mother while he was away at war: “I think I was better off in the trenches,” he comments.) As well as being typical of a number of British films of the 1940s that sought to depict the lives of “ordinary people,” the film can be seen as a precursor, albeit in a very different style, of future family sagas of the British cinema from auteurs of the calibre of Terence Davies and Mike Leigh. At the end of his diatribe against Coward in the 1946 British Theatre Yearbook, Peter Noble had asked: “What will he do in the new world which we are now trying to build from the ruins of the old?”29 In fact, Coward managed very successfully to accommodate his talents to the

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changing times. His plays were to enjoy a remarkable revival of reputation in the 1960s, partly through the championing of them by the National Theatre in London and partly through their perceived similarity to the clipped verbal precision and oblique communication of a modern master like Harold Pinter. Coward became a legendary cabaret entertainer in America and scored a huge personal success in a CBS television production of This Happy Breed in 1957, in which he starred as Frank Gibbons. Ironically, the greatest of his later screen performances was as a pompous MI6 official, Hawthorne in Carol Reed’s Our Man in Havana (1960), adapted from his own novel by Coward’s old adversary, Graham Greene. The two had now met and had been reconciled (it is an odd thought that David Selznick’s preferred actor for the role of Harry Lime in the classic Greene/Carol Reed collaboration, The Third Man, was originally Noël Coward); and it was widely felt by many critics that Coward’s performance stole the film. As for David Lean, he was simply to become the most celebrated and honored director of the British cinema, held at arm’s length by the critics, but whose films were adored by the public and held in awe by his directing peers, particularly in Hollywood. This Happy Breed might seem, at first glance, to be one of his less individual and ambitious films. Nevertheless, as his first solo directing credit, it did mark an auspicious debut, a felicitous example of a cinematic adaptation of a theatrical original that remains faithful to its source and yet exhibits a good deal of refreshing filmic flair in its own right. There are small touches that look forward to Brief Encounter, such as the moment when Frank wipes a smudge off Ethel’s face in a manner that anticipates the way Alec will remove a piece of grit from Laura’s eye in their fateful first encounter in the later film, or Ethel’s “Have it your own way” to Frank toward the end of This Happy Breed, which will be the habitual and arguably thoughtless refrain of Laura’s husband Fred in Brief Encounter that will add to her frustration. Yet there are other ways in which the characterization in this film will anticipate future concerns, particularly the character of Queenie. She will be the first in a whole line of David Lean heroines – Laura in Brief Encounter, the Ann Todd character in The Passionate Friends (1949), the Katharine Hepburn heroine of Summer Madness (1955), Rosie Ryan in Ryan’s Daughter (1970), Adela in A Passage to India – who will become dissatisfied with their perceived role in life and make a valiant attempt to break through personal repression and social restraints toward some form of emotional fulfilment; before falling back and settling – in some cases, equivocally and ambiguously – for what they have.

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Above all, like so many of Lean’s greatest films, it is a film about the national character, where deep feelings are often masked under a surface of humor, understatement, and restraint. In his magnificent later epics, like The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, and A Passage to India, Lean will transport his characters, still carrying their English baggage with them, into hot foreign climates and then anatomize the impact on their emotional temperament as English restraints and rationality wilt under the sun. In This Happy Breed, he is, for the time being, prepared to stay at home and perhaps reflect on his origins – born in Croydon, the son of an accountant – which are not that different from the family in the film. Coward saw This Happy Breed as an acknowledgement of his suburban roots, and it could be seen to be Lean’s also. They were both glad eventually to escape, but they both recognized that this background was an indelible part of their make-up and of what they would become. The film might be more personal than Lean was prepared to admit; and it is certainly finer than he generally allowed. Notes 1. G. Payn and S. Morley, eds., The Noël Coward Diaries (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982): 18. 2. J. Mills, Up in the Clouds, Gentlemen Please (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980): 258. 3. A. Silver and J. Ursini, David Lean and His Films (London: Leslie Frewin, 1974): 37. 4. S. Morley, A Talent to Amuse (London: Heinemann, 1969): 233. 5. Payn and Morley, Noël Coward Diaries: 19. 6. B. Day (ed.), The Letters of Noël Coward (London: Methuen, 2007): 504. 7. K. Brownlow, David Lean (London: Faber & Faber, 1997): 180. 8. Mills, Up in the Clouds: 272–273. 9. S. M. Silverman, David Lean (London: Andre Deutsch, 1989): 11. 10. B. McFarlane, An Autobiography of British Cinema (London: Methuen, 1997): 332. 11. Brownlow, David Lean: 181. 12. McFarlane, British Cinema: 595. 13. Silver and Ursini, David Lean and His Films: 26. 14. S. Genailtay, “Restoration: ‘This Happy Breed’,” Sight and Sound, 18.7 (2008): 42. 15. Ibid., 43. 16. Brownlow, David Lean: 182. 17. Ibid., 178. 18. C. Tookey, The Critics’ Film Guide (London: Boxtree, 1994): 857. 19. Brownlow, David Lean: 181. 20. Tookey, Critics’ Film Guide: 857. 21. P. Hoare, Noël Coward (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995): 363.

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22. N. Coward, Play Parade, vol. iv (London: Heinemann, 1954): ix. 23. Ibid., ix. 24. A. Lejeune (ed.), The C. A. Lejeune Film Reader (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991): 203. 25. Pressbook for This Happy Breed, May 1944: 8. 26. J. Richards, Films and British National Identity (Manchester University Press, 1997): 106. 27. G. Orwell, The Collected Essays of George Orwell, vol. III: 1943–1945 (London: Penguin, 1968): 16. 28. Ibid., 55. 29. Hoare, Noël Coward: 363.

chapter 4

The Browning Version revisited Marcia Landy

Terence Rattigan’s one-act play, The Browning Version, was first produced for the theatre in 1948 and has enjoyed, along with his other plays (e.g. The Winslow Boy [1946]), a remarkable life in theatre, television, and cinema.1 The stage play of The Browning Version (the focus of this chapter) was adapted for cinema in 1951 and was directed by Anthony Asquith. It starred Michael Redgrave and also featured Jean Kent, Nigel Patrick, and Wilfrid Hyde-White. A BBC TV version starring Peter Cushing appeared in 1955, and a BBC radio performance of the play in 1957 with John Gielgud led to Gielgud’s appearing in an American TV performance.2 Yet another BBC TV performance was remade in 1985 with Judi Dench and Ian Holm, and in 1994 a remake of the 1951 film featured Albert Finney, Greta Scacchi, Matthew Modine, and Julian Sands. I cite these various renditions as a way of charting the transformations of the play into adaptation and remake so as to comment on and dispel commonly held assumptions about the inferiority (or superiority) of cinematic and televisual productions based on lack of fidelity to the host text (novel and play) and the predictable charge of distorting classical texts “problematised by a cultural and academic history that favours words over images.” This position is based on a mistrust of audiovisual media, which are assumed to “starve the imagination,” and it disregards how words are also images.3 While critical attention has largely focused on film adaptation of novels and short stories, film critics of British cinema such as Tom Ryall have illuminated the historical importance of theatre adaptation to British and international media.4 My chapter proposes to regard the play, its 1951 adaptation, and the 1994 “remake” of the earlier film as counterevidence to commonly held views on the inadequacy of adaptation by creating a dialogue between theatrical and cinematic versions rather than opposing them to each other. By examining the various productions of The Browning Version as play, adaptation, and films, it will become apparent that each of these texts, while interacting with 62

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host texts, is semi-autonomous. An examination of these interactions provides evidence of the historical distinctiveness of the adaptation and remake as they reveal changing moments in British culture and shed light on the history and development of British theatre, audiovisual media, and culture.5

What is the source of the problem? I begin with an excursion into Rattigan’s biography (e.g. Geoffrey Wansell, Darlow and Hodson, B. A. Young, Susan Rusinko)6 that traces Rattigan’s familial history, his education at Harrow and Oxford, and his predilections for and circumspect behavior with same-sex companions from his university year. His relations with his family were guided by the need for “keeping up appearances”; his behavior, as for many other gay men of his generation, was also determined by the “risk of scandal, ruin, and a period in prison.”7 He began writing plays while at Harrow, and by the time he arrived at Oxford he was determined to become a serious writer.8 Rattigan left Oxford minus degree, and his first play, written with Philip Heimann (with whom he was enamored), went into production in 1933. The play, ultimately titled First Episode, was based on experiences at Oxford and had a brief stage life in London and New York. His first bona fide success at age twenty-two was French Without Tears, and for several decades he was a major figure in British theatre. In Rattigan’s estimation (and that of many critics and reviewers of the time), his theatre career went into decline with the rise in the mid fifties of the philosophical plays of Samuel Beckett and those of the “Angry Young Men,” with their passionate social realist dramas involving the discontents of working-class life, as exemplified in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.9 While Rattigan was bitter about diminishing box-office returns and critical reviews, his plays, in Wansell’s judgment and in the ongoing adaptations and remakes of his works, “have demonstrated conclusively just how much his finest work retains its capacity to fascinate an audience.”10 The periodic return to his plays indicates that in their form, content, and choice of language they are a compendium of cultural folklore and memory, a penetrating portrait of public-school myths and personal reflections, with stark insights into deteriorating heterosexual relations and oblique allusions and clues to gay readings.11 Rattigan’s style is characterized by allusive and visually evocative language, an incisive sense of character and milieu, finely crafted plots, a scrupulous attention to detail, and a delicate sense of his audience’s limitations. His style lends itself to “translation” into other

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media; hence, it is not surprising that many of Rattigan’s works have lent themselves to cinema and television. The language of the play by way of dialogue, stage directions, and theatricality became the site for different artistic forms and meanings to emerge. The Browning Version is the drama of the final days of a classics master in a public school, forced by ill health to retire and to take a less stressful position at a “crammer” (a more lowly type of school than the one where he is currently employed, at which he will prepare young boys to qualify for public school). Crocker-Harris’s relations to his students and to his colleagues are not presented in the context of a school setting but are incorporated into the domestic scenes of a marriage. The play’s form belongs to the theatre tradition of the Kammerspiel that focuses on a private and intimate view of the protagonist’s conflicts. The world of the public school is, nonetheless, evident through characters that infringe on the private domain. The play does not need to remind the audience of the public school, since it is evoked through the dialogue and characters. Audiences of the 1940s would be familiar with public-school lore from literature and cinema. The father-teacher-governor as a molder of young men’s minds was current in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (Thomas Hughes, 1857), Goodbye, Mr. Chips (James Hilton, 1934) – described by Jeffrey Richards as the “Ideal Schoolmaster” – Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1929), and E. M. Forster’s The Longest Journey (1902).12 From fiction and non-fiction texts on the mythology and practices of the public school, the reader gains a sense of the sway and cultural currency of the public school involving numerous descriptions of the privileged upper class, the ambitious middle class, the token scholarship boys, and the powerful headmaster. Social class and sexual hierarchies are evident as are disciplinary rituals (flogging, bullying, beating, and verbal forms of humiliation), attitudes toward friendships (including same-sex practices), and their overt and covert forms of expression. This cultural and social lore, inherent in the portraits of the public school, are also evident from the currency of visual displays, paintings, cartoons, and caricatures of the setting, administration, headmasters, and students.13 Andrew Crocker-Harris’s dilemma as pedagogue can be understood in this context. In Rattigan’s play, Crocker-Harris is no Mr. Chips, as his embittered wife reminds him and as he discovers from the appellation, “The Himmler of Lower Fifth,” and from his degrading treatment at the hands of Headmaster Frobisher. However, the play does not focus on the boys’ world, but is rather an exploration of a schoolmaster who does not perform according to the myth of the popular educator. Rattigan’s biographers attribute Andrew’s character

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to a classics teacher at Harrow, Professor J. W. Coke-Norris, who had also been forced to leave his post prematurely.14 The choice of a schoolmaster in perpetual conflict with his students and with a disaffected wife is also linked to post-Second World War “marital fatigue,” as Raymond Durgnat termed domestic portraits in films of the late 1940s and 1950s. Furthermore, the calls for changes in education and sexual legislation – beginning in the late 1940s and culminating in the late 1950s with the Wolfenden Report (1957) – were testimony to the “general loosening of former moral standards” in the aftermath of the Second World War.15 While the play does not directly or polemically address these changes in its stage directions, its choice of characters, and its setting confined to the Crocker-Harris’s sitting room, it does dramatize a society in transition from a wartime economy affecting personal and public life. The stage direction of their flat describes the sitting room as “probably the biggest – and gloomiest room in the house,” in contrast to the “chintzy and genteel cheerfulness of the garden.”16 Middle-class life is conveyed in the descriptions of a “plain, moonfaced boy of about sixteen with glasses” named Taplow, who is receiving extra instruction to compensate for an absence caused by illness. The initial dialogue between young Taplow and chemistry instructor Frank Hunter sets up a visual contrast between the “rugged young man . . . wrapped in all the self-confidence of the popular master” (8) and the bespectacled Taplow, who is burdened by his subjection to his demanding and unpopular classics master. In their conversation in which Taplow describes Andrew’s intimidating treatment, the boy imitates Andrew’s refusal to inform him about whether he has passed on to the next form: “My dear Taplow I have given you exactly what you deserve. No less: and certainly no more” (10). Hunter prods the boy about Andrew’s severe treatment of the students, and Taplow is quick to say that Andrew is not a sadist “like one or two others” (10). Defining the term for a nonplussed Hunter, Taplow adds, “A sadist, sir, is someone who gets pleasure out of pain” (11). The interactions between the two, through the stage mise en scène and dialogue, evoke images that draw on cultural memories from literature, pictures, movies, personal educational experiences, and sexual and gendered stereotypes. The entry of Millie Crocker-Harris, “more smartly dressed than the general run of schoolmasters’ wives” (12), signals a lack of consonance between her and her husband. Her passionate advances to Hunter, along with her attention to fashion, situate her as a modern siren in a location where sexual promiscuity has little currency. When Andrew arrives, described as “wearing a serge suit and a stiff collar,” as befits a schoolmaster of the old school, he is “carrying a portfolio,

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and looks, as ever, neat, complacent and unruffled. He speaks in a very gentle voice which he rarely raises” (17). Contrasts among the characters multiply in the interactions between Frank and Andrew, Millie and her husband, Millie and Frank, and in the tensions between traditional and “modern” behaviors toward social roles. The play seems intent on stressing these binary oppositions: different worlds, mores, manners, and beliefs that the dialogue evokes and visualizes. For example, the timetable that Andrew shows Hunter is evocative of his punctiliousness, giving rise to other aspects of his mechanical behavior and creating in the mind of the spectators a visual analogue to the dialogue. As Darlow and Hudson write, “It is not the intrinsic quality of the words that matter, but the amount and nature of the emotion they convey.”17 The emotion is conveyed through the power of the words to elicit sensory images based on vision and sound that connote as well as denote attitudes and behavior. The play is not unaware of its status as theatre; there are frequent references to tragedy in relation to the Agamemnon of Aeschylus (Illustration 4.1). The allusions to the Greek play are central to its language, thematics, and form – Taplow’s attempts at describing the passion of the language; Crocker-Harris’s resistance to the boy’s freedom with a classic text; the analogies implied about Millie as a Clytemnestra and Andrew as Agamemnon her murder victim; the description of their incompatibility as farce not tragedy; and the existence of Andrew’s own youthful, but uncompleted translation of the play. The Aeschylus play, Andrew’s uncompleted translation, and his timetable for classes suggest Andrew’s imprisonment in time. Taplow’s gift of the Browning version becomes the first step in breaking down the bars of Andrew’s resigned response to life displayed in his position as schoolmaster to

4.1 The 1994 version emphasizes the emotional drama of the account of Agamemnon by the cuckolded Andrew Crocker-Harris (Albert Finney).

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young boys and in his relationship to his wife, whereby he has allowed himself to succumb to her taunting about his inadequacy as scholar and husband. At the moment when Andrew learns that Taplow has bought the book for him, he can no longer contain his reserved demeanor. He takes the book and, to compose himself, sends the boy out of the room to get a glass from the bathroom to pour out his medicine. What has moved him is Taplow’s inscription in the book, “God from afar looks graciously upon a gentle master” from the Agamemnon (38). Millie enters, takes the book, and looks at the inscription, her comment being, “The artful little beast.” She attributes the motive of disingenuousness and opportunism to the boy. Millie/Clytemnestra’s killing of Andrew/Agamemnon elicits Frank’s shocked response. Words become implements of destruction in this modern adaptation of the Greek tragedy, dramatizing the effects of language to wound. Frank recoils from the cruelty, separating himself permanently from Millie, telling her, “If I live to be a hundred, I shall never forget that little glimpse you’ve just given me of yourself ” (40) (Illustration 4.2). In his attempt to offer sympathy to Andrew, the audience learns (foreshadowed through his banter with Taplow) that he does not understand tragedy or psychology, while Andrew, despite his apparent passivity, has understood and has accepted his situation. Andrew paints a picture for Frank of his barren marriage: “Two kinds of love. Hers and mine. Worlds apart . . . I may have been a brilliant classical scholar, but I was woefully ignorant of the facts of life.” He reduces his marital discord to “Merely the problem of an unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband . . . usually a subject for farce” (46). Frank’s inept and clichéd advice and offer of friendship serve to further

4.2 Mrs. Crocker-Harris (Greta Scacchi) visits erstwhile lover Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine) at his digs in hopes of reigniting their romance in the 1994 version.

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underline the distance between the two kinds of love to which Andrew has alluded and Frank’s naïve conception of the couple’s relationship. As in many of the other encounters between Andrew, Frobisher, Taplow, Gilbert, and Millie, the play in its economy of setting and of metaphor paints pictures of Andrew that bring his life as schoolmaster and his loveless marriage into contact with each other as mutually reinforcing. In the spirit of the Kammerspiel, this play relies on intimate surroundings and on the plight and interactions of the central character: the world beyond the stage is ever present through its constant verbal-visual invocations to “worlds apart.” Though this form of drama may have been congenial to German and Scandinavian films of the silent and early sound era, the British film industry after the Second World War opted for a different form, as the 1951 adaptation reveals.

Adapting for the cinema The first adaptation of the play for the cinema was directed by Anthony Asquith (1951), associated with earlier Rattigan adaptations, French Without Tears (1940) and The Winslow Boy (1948). Asquith’s career in cinema, which began in the silent cinema with such films as Shooting Stars (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), revealed an experimental, expressionist, and metacinematic aspect not dissimilar to Hitchcock.18 In the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was involved with two successful adaptations, Shaw’s Pygmalion (1938) and Rattigan’s French Without Tears (1940). During the war years he made instructional films and war dramas, as well as a popular Gainsborough costume drama, Fanny By Gaslight (1944), starring familiar stars such as Phyllis Calvert, James Mason, and Stewart Granger. In the postwar era, Asquith returned to genre films (e.g. crime film as in The Woman in Question, 1950) and to adaptations of plays, beginning with The Winslow Boy, followed by The Browning Version and The Importance of Being Earnest, all three highly successful productions. The significance of these films extends beyond their individual styles identified with Asquith’s signature and belongs to a certain strain of British filmmaking associated with the theatre, in its choice of classical and popular dramatic plays for adaptation, a particular historical treatment of mise en scène, and use of actors from the British theatre. According to Tom Ryall, “the adaptation of prestigious dramatic and literary material has been seen as a means of raising the social profile of cinema, a way of authenticating it in orthodox cultural terms, at various points in the history of the medium.”19 The theatricality of this cinema, associated with familiar canonical texts and actors from the

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theatre, is pitched to a middlebrow audience, serious but undemanding. This middlebrow cinema reveals more than a mere verbal and structural relation between theatrical and cinematic forms: it shows a predilection for a certain “tone and temperament” that envisions an audience uncomfortable with both avant-garde and popular forms. This form of theatrical adaptation to film, termed by British critics as “quality” cinema, is identified as having a “specific class-bound ethos with the traditional art form,” as well as a dependence on stage actors and a style of acting associated with the “open space of the theatre auditorium rather than the enforced intimacy of the camera,” and with “static camera work, restricted camera angles, minimal editing, the uninterrupted take, and the shooting in a studio.”20 Asquith’s treatment of the Rattigan play relies on a cast identified with theatre and, to a lesser extent, cinema. Michael Redgrave was given the role of Andrew Crocker-Harris when Asquith learned that Eric Portman, who had appeared in the play, was unavailable. Redgrave too was associated with theatre (and to a lesser extent with cinema) until his successful performance along with Margaret Lockwood in The Lady Vanishes (1938), directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This film made him a contender for movie stardom, encouraging producers such as Edward Black to capitalize on the Redgrave-Lockwood combination.21 Redgrave’s growing success as a film actor was also owing to his role as the ventriloquist in Dead of Night (1945). That part and his performance as Crocker-Harris are considered to be among his greatest pieces of film acting.22 As was his practice, Redgrave carefully studied the character of Crocker-Harris, Stanislavsky-style, in order to capture the sense of this “prematurely-aged failure” who cannot satisfy the sexual needs of his wife, played by Jean Kent. Kent had appeared in a large number of British films, largely in transgressive and abrasive feminine roles. Wilfrid Hyde-White, who appeared as the headmaster, was also identified with stage and screen, especially as a character actor (Illustration 4.3). Ronald Howard, the son of popular screen actor Leslie Howard, played the new classics teacher Gilbert. Nigel Patrick, as the chemistry professor Frank Hunter, was identified with stage and screen, while novice Brian Smith played young Taplow. One of the major critical contentions concerning the film adaptation was the license taken by adding scenes (“opening out” the play). While the action in the play takes place in the Crocker-Harris cottage, as befitting a Kammerspiel, the film adds twenty minutes to the opening so as to situate the events and introduce the characters in the milieu of the British public school. More controversial to critics was the changed ending, adding a farewell dinner at the Headmaster’s, and the awards ceremony, where

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4.3 In the 1951 version Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) knuckles under to the insulting demands of the headmaster (Wilfrid Hyde-White).

Crocker-Harris presents his valedictory speech. Also, two scenes in the classroom with Gilbert take place not in the cottage but in the classroom, and another scene with the headmaster takes place during the school cricket match. The film maintains a dual focus on Crocker-Harris as schoolmaster and as the cuckolded and sexually inadequate husband. In the style of theatrical cinema, these additions capitalize on both the economy of language of the play and on the connotative dimension of the play’s dialogue and metaphors – the medicine bottle, cigarette case, clothing, clocks, books, and papers that while visualized through dialogue come to play a role as interpretive aids. The “opening out” serves to provide further illustration of the interplay between the characters and their public and private milieus. Complaints concerning the adaptation appeared in reviews – namely, the charge that there was “too much interest in the supporting actors” and that it “distracted from interest in the principal characters.”23 Another reviewer opined, “The mastery of the play is brought out by comparing it to the film [which] is both longer and more explicit, and therefore weaker.”24 Jean Kent’s Millie – Asquith’s original choice was Margaret Lockwood – was described as “overdrawn,” “a tiresome interruption,” and exhibiting “faults of emphasis.”25 Nonetheless, the film garnered awards, and Redgrave’s Crocker-Harris was consistently singled out as a brilliant performance. The architecture of the school, the chapel, and classroom scenes are a visible testimony to the film’s “middlebrow” character, making more explicit images in the play. The public settings underscore the constraining external world, in which “the Crock” functions, reinforcing the contrast between him and his younger colleagues. They serve also to develop further the conflict between tradition and modernity, specifically the preference for the

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sciences and sports rather than classical learning. The outdoor and classroom scenes reinforce the tension between conformity, ritual, and tradition – with which Crocker-Harris is identified – and changing patterns of behavior, as exemplified by the younger teachers. Crocker-Harris thus incarnates the residual and fading element of an earlier world. The film’s social orientation, its focus on a schoolmaster, evokes controversies over education familiar to middle-class audiences. For example, the instruction of the classics was part of the moral and anti-scientific ethos that persisted into the twentieth century, but “much of the learning [of languages] was through memorization. The role of crammers [in one of which Crocker-Harris’s new position will be] was to get the boys through this deadly and deadening requirement.”26 Furthermore, Wilfrid HydeWhite’s Headmaster Frobisher is a familiar caricature of the headmaster in the postwar world. No longer the disciplinary dictator, he is a businessman and public relations person (as is the headmaster in Anderson’s If . . . [1968]) who supports science, sports, and commercial success. The film does not, any more than the play, dwell on the competitive relations among students. Another aspect of Crocker-Harris’s role as teacher of classics that would have been recognized by some members of the film audience was the association of the classics with an “openly erotic homosexual literature.”27 Given the addition of the school scenes, Millie’s reproachful reference to Andrew as being “no Mr. Chips” assumes greater significance in relation to her dissatisfaction over his failure as teacher – but also as spouse. Andrew is out of step with his moment in time and with his peers. The scenes in the two classrooms, the chemistry and the classics, and the two masters represent these differences visually. In the case of the chemistry class, the room is bright, the students disorderly and loud, and the teacher is on informal terms with his students. By contrast, the classics classroom is dark; the students are glued to their seats. And Crocker-Harris sitting at this desk dominates the scene. Gilbert, the new teacher, becomes an observer to this drama of tyrannical authority and to the humiliation of Taplow, who is interrogated about his laughter over a Latin quotation that he cannot translate. This episode is featured verbatim from the play, but coming as it does in the classroom (and viewed through the painful close-ups between the boy and the teacher), it establishes an ambiguous bond between the man and the boy, since the viewer has already witnessed the other boys’ contempt of the teacher prior to his entering his classroom. Another element that is highlighted in the film is its heightened awareness of time; in the contrast between Hunter’s early dismissal of his class and Andrew’s chastisement

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of Wilson for being late to chapel. Other allusions to time include Andrew’s insistence that the boys remain until the end of class, his peering at his pocket watch, and the use of the offscreen sound of the chimes that ring the passing time. Another visual contrast set up in the first twenty minutes of the film that will serve as a coda is the emphasis on the opening and shutting of doors, conveying visually the conflict between internal and external, domestic and institutional worlds. The scene in the Crocker-Harris home reinforces this contrast, relying on events and dialogue from the play. The audience is now given a more intimate view of Taplow and Hunter. Hunter’s treatment of Taplow is ironic. He encourages the young boy to talk freely about his attitude toward Crocker-Harris, which turns out surprisingly to reveal sympathy for his teacher. Millie, who functions repeatedly as a disturbing presence, interrupts Taplow’s imitation of Crocker-Harris. Dressed in a shantung dress, a jaunty straw hat, and impeccably made-up, she appears out of place in this setting. Through close-up the viewer is privileged to intuit her close relationship with Hunter. When she sends the boy off on an errand to be rid of him, bribing him with money for an ice (to stay away longer), her cool demeanor turns to passionate reproach of Frank. He treats her evasively: it is obvious that her demands and jealousy are unwelcome but not to be resisted. Andrew returns home and offers Hunter a view of his timetable for classes. The large sheet of paper (seen in close-up) reinforces Andrew’s punctiliousness, his obsession with order. Taplow’s “late” arrival is noted by Andrew: “Time waits, and so do I.” Andrew’s comment, like his timetable and pocket watch, suggests that he is time’s prisoner rather than its master. As teacher and pupil set about to work on the translation of the Agamemnon, the scene cuts to Frank and Millie in the garden, where she complains of her husband’s “lack of gumption.” Her close-ups dramatize her resentment and rage. The inter-cutting between garden and sitting room reinforce a contrast between Millie’s uncontrollable passion (like Clytemnestra in the Agamemnon) and Andrew’s inflexible demeanor, highlighted in his insistence on Taplow’s attention to precision in translation. But Taplow’s fervor for the play is infectious, exposing Andrew’s own emotion and revealing that, when younger, he had undertaken an English translation. A series of shot-countershots in close-up suggest a more intimate bond between master and student, while the inter-cut scenes between Millie and Frank underscore Millie and Andrew’s estrangement from each other and suggest that Andrew’s stiffness is connected to habituation and restraint. A school cricket game (another addition) reiterates the opposition between the internal domestic situation and the external world. The

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emptiness and silences of the marriage are juxtaposed to the crowded and noisy social world of appearances. The camera pans the spectators and settles on middle-distance shots of Millie dressed in a flamboyant floral print dress and a large double-brimmed straw hat, flaunting a defiant image of herself. Headmaster Frobisher (Wilfrid Hyde-White) approaches Andrew for a chat, and the camera makes a slow zoom to Millie with Frank, who are being watched by others. Another cinematic element of the adaptation is its emphasis on how the couple is observed (and commented upon), thus justifying the inclusion of subordinate characters. The conversations between Frobisher and Crocker-Harris, drawn from the play, are transposed to out-of-doors. Frobisher’s false geniality is matched by Andrew’s controlled behavior. The headmaster interrupts this awkward conversation frequently to cheer the team, until Andrew finally learns that his petition for a pension has been denied. Andrew attempts to dissuade Frobisher, but to no avail. The headmaster further requests Andrew to speak first during the awards day ceremony to save Andrew embarrassment about the anticipated enthusiastic response for the departing sports director. Again, Andrew decorously acquiesces. Before assembled guests, Millie taunts him with, “Well, did we get the pension?” These scenes underscore the portrait of Andrew’s humiliating professional and domestic circumstances as well as of his repressed, stiff-upper-lip acceptance of his situation. In his classroom (another addition), where Andrew has gone to gather his books, he finds the manuscript of his unfinished Agamemnon translation. Gilbert enters and, following the dialogue of the play, Andrew learns how others perceive him, as the “Himmler of the Lower Fifth.” When Gilbert leaves, the camera lingers on Andrew alone in this dimly lit room. This scene sets the tone for his encounter with Millie at home as she taunts him about the pension, saying that Gilbert, by contrast, would, when he retires, leave the school like Mr. Chips, and she stomps off, leaving him once again in isolation. Taplow arrives to the cottage to say goodbye and notices the recovered manuscript and, unseen by Andrew, takes it. He then gives Andrew a copy of Browning’s translation of the Agamemnon. The scene lingers on the boy’s presentation of the gift that uncharacteristically brings Andrew to tears (Illustration 4.4). According to Tom Ryall, what distinguishes this drawn-out moment as being cinematic is the camera work. Medium close-up, the proximity of the actors to the viewer, and the changing camera angles endow this interaction with an intensity and intimacy that belongs to cinema.28 Another momentary image of a different Andrew is

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4.4 An unexpected present from a student prompts an emotional reaction from the hitherto-repressed Crocker-Harris (Michael Redgrave) in the 1951 version.

enhanced by the arrival of Frank, with whom Andrew shares the pleasure of the gift, and its inscription, “God looks graciously from afar upon a gentle master.” Millie, dressed in a long black chiffon dress with a large artificial rose at her bosom, interrupts this cheerful moment. Learning of the gift (as in the play), she interprets it as a gift of appeasement. The word “appeasement” resonates in the context of the Second World War comparison of Andrew to Himmler delivered earlier by Gilbert. Wounded but wordless, Andrew leaves the room, and Frank tells Millie that their relationship is over. Pleading with him, she tells him she needed him “to want her as a woman.” Her pathos does not move Frank, who is determined to reveal “the truth” to Andrew. As Andrew dresses, Frank enters the bedroom and attempts unsuccessfully to convince him to leave Millie: “She is out to kill you.” (Andrew’s fuller description of the couple’s relationship is reserved for a scene that takes place between the two men at a farewell dinner.) After Frank’s departure, Andrew informs Millie that he does not expect her to join him when he assumes his new position, and a telephone call from the headmaster reveals another side of Andrew when he tells Frobisher that he will, after all, as is his privilege, speak last at the awards ceremony. The headmaster’s dinner becomes the moment for a final confrontation between Andrew and Frank where Andrew describes the “grave wrong” that he has done Millie by marrying her. It is here that he informs Frank that Millie “is to be pitied.” He was unable to give her the kind of love she required, and he describes their marriage as a case of “an unsatisfied wife and a henpecked husband.” The after-dinner fireworks provide a moment of spectacle, as if making visible a release from the pent-up emotion of the

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domestic scenes, and serve as prologue to the couple’s separation. Andrew informs Millie that he will remain in the cottage until it is time to take up his new post, and that she need not follow him. The verbal interaction between the couple is minimal thereafter; Taplow arrives and delivers to Millie a small package from Frank. She opens it, and the cigarette lighter that she had given Frank falls to the floor. Andrew enters the room and picks up the lighter. Silently, she places it in her purse. He sits at his desk as she prepares to leave. She hovers uncertainly, but he ignores her, only raising his head from his papers after she goes out the door. This wordless but highly visual scene makes explicit their rupture. The awards ceremony climaxes the film with the headmaster in charge, shots of Andrew and the departing sports director Fletcher (Bill Travis) in their appointed seats, and numerous cuts to the assembled audience. After a brief and banal short speech by Fletcher, Andrew rises and delivers an impassioned apology for his failure: “I have failed to give you what you deserve,” acknowledging that he has merited the name of “Himmler of the Lower Fifth.” He hopes that others can forgive him, though he cannot forgive himself for “degrading the noblest calling a man can follow.” There are numerous inter-cuts to the audience, to Gilbert, Frank, and the various boys, and especially close-ups of Taplow. When Andrew finishes, there is thunderous applause. He exits to the congratulations of his colleagues and a farewell from Taplow, who returns Andrew’s manuscript, praising it for being “like a modern text.” Rousing music accompanies his movements toward the college. Thus the stark ending of the play, with its ambiguity about the couple’s future, is altered to provide a closure consonant with the expectations of the cinematic culture of the time accustomed to some form of reconciliation. In this case, the reconciliation resides in Andrew’s rejection of the image of the Englishman decorously resigned to adversity. Despite its commercial success, the film adaptation has its detractors. Darlow and Hudson write, the mastery of the play is brought out by comparing it to the film . . . The film, although it conveys some of the same feeling, is both longer and more explicit. By opening out to include the life of the whole school and the Crocker-Harris’s relations with other members of the staff, the film undermines the universal implications of Crocker-Harris’s tragedy, narrowing attention onto his role as a master of a public school.29

This comparison suggests that the film’s success was gained by pandering to the middlebrow audience at the expense of the play. While Dilys Powell found that the film adaptation presented “nothing to distract attention

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from the central figure; even when the man is not on the screen the audience is thinking about him,”30 most other reviewers found the added scenes, particularly those at the end, to be “an unnecessary underlining of the worm turning at the close.”31 In contradistinction to these objections, the scenes in the chapel, classroom, and playing field function as an instance of cinema’s capacity to treat space more fluidly than the stage and serve also to present a more complex, even intimate, view of connections between Crocker-Harris as repressed schoolmaster and as husband brought together most dramatically in the juxtaposition of the final and wordless scene between Mille and Andrew before the awards ceremony. Also, the camera and editing allow a more intimate sense of the protagonists for both intra- and extra-diegetic audiences. The film is also daring in its stronger links between Taplow and Andrew in bringing the “other kind of love” into prominence conveyed through the pedagogical experience. In addition, the film dramatizes and undermines the national mythology of Englishness as exemplified by the notion of accepting, of being able to “take it” and confront whatever obstacles life brings. In the context of film history, this adaptation of The Browning Version offered a window through cinema onto a postwar world uneasy with, yet still tied to, national, ethical, and moral values, sexual “norms,” and rising conflicts between private and public life. While the play is a drama of failure, the 1994 remake is another text, one that modestly challenges the constraints of conformity through Crocker-Harris’s public admission of the failure.

What is a remake? The BBC television versions (in 1957 and 1985) are indicative of the persistence of British cultural memory of the Rattigan play.32 In contrast, the 1994 film is, as validated by producer and director (and also reviewers), a “remake” of the 1951 film rather than an adaptation of the play.33 According to Robert Eberwein, “A remake is a kind of reading or rereading of the original. To follow this reading or rereading, we have to examine not only our own conditions of reception, but also to return to the original and open its conditions of reception.”34 Considerations of reception entail significant alterations from the host text(s), clues to the designs of the remake on the audience, and to the cultural and historical moments that prompted a remake. The 1994 production “opens out” the 1951 adaptation, bringing it into the present by highlighting divorce, promiscuity, and graphic language with

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references to “shagging,” “fucking,” and “tits,” in alluding to the physical relationship between Laura (formerly Millie) and Hunter. The long shots of the school ally the remake to the spate of “heritage” films exemplified by the popularity of Brideshead Revisited (TV, 1981), A Passage to India (1984), A Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), The Remains of the Day (1993), Carrington (1995), and Howards End (1992), among others.35 Bearing the cultural and cinematic signs and symptoms of this profitable and popular form of filmmaking, these films can be regarded as an updated form of middlebrow culture. Their stylistic characteristics include a visual, museum-like display of elite and upper-class British architecture and institutions, furniture, paintings, the use of British stars associated with theatre and cinema (Judi Dench, Helena Bonham Carter, John Gielgud, Emma Thompson, Jonathan Pryce, Jeremy Northam, Peggy Ashcroft, Judy Davis, and Anthony Hopkins), a twinned focus on public and private conflicts, and a reliance on tradition. The films have an investment in history, focusing on critical moments of cultural transition. Significantly, as part of this cultural landscape, sexuality plays a major role, both heterosexual and, to a lesser extent, homosexual. In the wide-screen Technicolor The Browning Version, shots of the school and the landscape are highlighted in long and wide-angle shots. Inside the school, the camera pays close attention to paintings, sculpture, and rooms laden with objects conveying the august origins of the public school and the rituals of its inhabitants (including the bullying of the upperclassmen as intermediaries for the headmaster and individual masters). The Crocker-Harrises’s thatched cottage situates them in the heart of rural England. The shots of the town are also selected for their evocation of a bygone world. Before the characters are introduced, the spectator is regaled with images of the much-vaunted countryside. The film begins earlier than the 1951 version, with shots of the countryside as the replacement for Crocker-Harris (Julian Sands) arrives by car, and Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine) is filmed cycling to the school through the lush green Dorset landscape. The remake connects to the adaptation by repeating the late arrival by one of the boys, providing an opportunity for the porter to explain to Gilbert the school’s disciplinary practices. The chapel scene introduces the principals in close-up. Albert Finney as Crocker-Harris is repeatedly filmed in a single shot, apart from the others, an isolated figure. As in the play, he is a classics teacher; however, his replacement Gilbert is a modern-language teacher, and Frank Hunter (Matthew Modine) has changed from being an Englishman to an American.

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The dialogue at critical moments in the text of this remake is similar to the play and the earlier film; for example, the line identified with CrockerHarris’s refusal to reveal their results to the boys prematurely is reiterated (not once but several times), “You have obtained exactly what you have deserved, no more, no less.” This line becomes the basis for the boys’ and particularly Taplow’s imitation of Crocker-Harris. However, the classroom scenes focus a great deal more than the Asquith film on the groups of boys and their relations to each other and to their teachers. Even the classroom sequences derived from the earlier film pay more attention to the interactions of the students while maintaining the contrast between Hunter and Crocker-Harris. The informal atmosphere of Frank’s classroom is followed by an extended portrait of Crocker-Harris’s, in which the boys, prior to his arrival, vent their antipathy to the classics master, referring to his sexless life and, even more callously, to his heart trouble. With Crocker-Harris’s entry, the scene follows events from the earlier film, including Taplow’s laughter at the Latin quotation he does not understand. Taplow, too, will play a prominent role in Crocker-Harris’s fate. Further, his classroom appears larger and has an affluent look, containing pictures, bookcases, and sturdy desks, and the remake adds a moving reading from the Agamemnon by Crocker-Harris that serves to mitigate his autocratic behavior. A long shot of Crocker-Harris’s quaint thatched cottage, in contrast to the more modest one in the adaptation, contains scenes derived from the play reproduced in the 1951 film: Taplow’s imitation of Crocker-Harris, Laura’s desire to send Taplow away to be alone with Frank, Andrew’s tutorial with Taplow, and his confession about his own verse translation of the Aeschylus. The camera work here, as elsewhere, is attentive to the use of close-up at critical moments (e.g. the extended close-ups of CrockerHarris as he reads and Taplow as he observes his teacher) and of the need to establish the mise en scène (e.g. the medium shots of the school interior when Frank takes Gilbert on a tour, injecting a history of the school by way of paintings and furniture). Instead of the awkward and claustrophobic lunch scene between the couple in the earlier film, this remake cuts to a brightly lit breakfast scene where Laura receives a letter, the content of which she refuses to impart to Andrew, and she leaves hurriedly. Carried over from the play and adaptation is the adulterous relationship between Crocker-Harris’s wife and the chemistry master, Hunter; and a new scene is introduced as she cycles to Frank’s lodgings (neither in the play nor Asquith version) to visit Hunter, who displays little enthusiasm at her visit. Behaving seductively as she lets

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her hair down and stretches out on his bed, she pleads for a more binding relationship with him, while he demurs. This scene is followed by the arrival of Frobisher at the cottage to inform Andrew of the denial of a pension. Laura arrives, and, in another tableau of this dead marriage, she taunts him about the pension, scornfully calling him a “wimp.” Laura’s insult becomes the opportunity to film a shower scene with the boys. Upperclassman Trubshaw dismisses others from the shower stall but insists that Taplow remain. Taplow is taunted to provide information about Mrs. Crocker-Harris’s sexual life. Trubshaw talks about her “getting it off with somebody” and asks if Taplow has seen her “tits.” Taplow’s humiliation climaxes with Trubshaw calling Taplow’s mother “a good fuck.” Laura’s visit to Franks’s lodging and the shower scene, which are neither in the play nor in the earlier film, are instances of how in this remake the contempt for female sexuality is explicit, and it is more in keeping with 1990s feminist and queer readings. The cricket game appropriated from the film adaptation further reinforces the film’s investment in masculinity and, to a lesser extent, femininity. The very private scene of Taplow’s gift of the Browning version takes place out-of-doors as Andrew, alone, looks out on the green fields. When Taplow gives him the book and he reads the writing on the flyleaf, it moves Andrew to tears. Returning to the group of masters at lunch, he shares his pleasure over the inscription (translated by Gilbert): “God looks graciously from afar on a gentle schoolmaster.” What distinguishes this scene from its other versions is its public character. Laura humiliates Andrew before Frank, Gilbert, and others by taunting him, informing him of Taplow’s imitation of him earlier, and describing the gift as a “bribe.” Andrew leaves abruptly. Silence reigns at the table until Franks urges Laura to tell him that this is a lie. She coldly responds that Andrew needs no sympathy; that is his strength, but Frank chooses to follow Andrew, who has taken refuge in the library, sitting at a bench between the stacks. In this setting, rather than in his home, Andrew delivers his speech about “different kinds of love.” This speech, coming as it does after the shower scene and Laura’s verbal deathblow, creates a sustained and corrosive portrait of marital conflict. At home, with the couple dressing for the evening’s festivities, Laura tries to make amends for her affront, but Andrew gently tells her that we “live in different worlds. We always have and always will.” The film visualizes their fragmented relations through a series of double mirror shots that reflect their images. The climax of the film loosely adheres to the Asquith version. Andrew delivers his decision to the headmaster that he will speak last at the awards

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ceremony. The filming of the occasion is consonant with the reiterated focus on public-school rituals. Andrew’s speech begins in worlds reminiscent of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, with its emphasis on culture as civilizing, but then he stops, walks from the platform, and with dialogue from the earlier film, confesses his failure. After loud applause, he exits and is surrounded by faculty and a group of students. Laura appears and embraces Andrew as they stand before a statue of Henry VIII, but he gently pushes her away, saying “You’ll miss your train”; she promises to write, and her car drives off. The last images return to the opening of the film, with the long shots of the car driving through the green countryside intercut with close-ups of Andrew. In concert with the play and the film adaptation, the remake provides further evidence for the permeability of the source texts, illuminating both the Rattigan play and the Asquith film. The connections among the texts work both sequentially and retrospectively, backward and forward, so as to illustrate the relations of each text to the other. Such a comparison situates the host texts in terms of their differing historical and cultural moments. It further offers evidence that the very concept of originality is illusory. The play, the adaptation, and the remake are contaminated by other cultural texts and other art forms, a composite of collusions with and concessions to temporal, social, individual, and aesthetic conditions.

Epilogue Film adaptation, as a form of critical engagement with and modification of an earlier source, dramatizes the historical and individual character of changes but also (and inevitably) of kinship. What is often judged to be a “violation” of an “original” is rather a different reading, a form of parasitism that preys on the text but does not necessarily destroy it. Conspicuous differences are based on demands elicited by changing economic conditions, altered cultural conditions, and shifting audience tastes. In the case of the 1951 film, the “opening out” of the play was necessitated by the requirement of producing a ninety-minute film from the shorter one-act play and transforming the stage play for a cinematic medium. Altering the setting of the play from the confines of the sitting room to the school enabled the adaptation to be identified as cinematic. Though characters, situations, and a large amount of dialogue from the play were maintained, they were filtered through casting, framing, editing, mise en scène, and particularly uses of close-up. The adaptation addressed themes derived from the play recognizable to its contemporary audiences. The film

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was not a weakened performance of the play. The adaptation created another identity as recognized by reviewers, if in backhanded fashion. The popular success of the film, as affirmed by its being selected for adaptation, by gratifying box-office receipts, and by awards, acknowledged the adaptation as a significant moment in English cultural life. The film adaptation interacted with a strong theatrical tradition in cinema that became central to the evolution of British cinema. The 1994 remake chose to identify its source from the 1951 film. The remake also interacts with the earlier play. The explicit and implied comparisons with both play and adaptation create a different sense of the past and, by implication, its use of the present. The remake situates the conflicts in a cinematic landscape recognizable to contemporary spectators from the popular heritage films of the 1980s. Its style and casting of actors evokes the changing contours of British cinema from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Albert Finney’s physical appearance, his style of acting, and his association with such films as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Tom Jones (1963), The Dresser (1983), and A Man of No Importance (1994) offer an ambiguous portrait of masculinity. His incarnation of Crocker-Harris contributes to an inevitable contrast, as reviews validate,36 to the earlier performance of Michael Redgrave, both textually and intertextually. Finney’s identification with abject and gay characters also reinforces the gay subtext that runs through the play and adaptation. Greta Scacchi’s Laura creates a more controlled version of beleaguered femininity than Jean Kent, and Matthew Modine as the physics professor portrays a less culpable Hunter. While maintaining dialogue from the play and incidents from the film, the remake “opens out” the adaptation, leading to a different ending, described by one reviewer as “saccharine.”37 The so-called “saccharine ending” is integrated into the treatment of the character and events inherent to the remake’s point of view. The remake is not a case of “adding nothing new . . . to the innumerable Browning Versions that have gone before it.”38 It is quite clear that the remake is in dialogue with explorations of identity politics, sexual politics, and an ethos of meritocracy. The schoolmaster’s contemplation of professional and marital failure are translated into the world of the 1990s and onto the limitations of the world he inhabits, one that laments the neglect of the classics, the lofty goals of humanistic education, and the absence of a love that could have been redemptive. The extensive shots of a green and grassy landscape, the august and solid architecture and statuary, bespeak a foundering English heritage. This heritage is ill assorted with the impersonal and calculating behavior of the

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headmaster, the indifference and resentment of many of the students, and the frustrations and hostility of the schoolmaster’s wife, toned down as her character is in appearance and acting in comparison with Jean Kent’s Millie. Further, through Trubshaw, the film invokes the ancient private-school practice of bullying the younger lads and reinforces the disparagement of feminine sexuality. Along with heightening the debased sexual body, the remake also injects an awareness of other cultures in the vignettes of African Prince Akadendi and his son in shots of the boy mingling with other students. The transposition of Frank Hunter from English to American is also a sign of the cross-cultural tendency of contemporary filmmaking and of the hybrid character of contemporary Englishness. Despite his rejection of Laura’s advances, Frank is ill equipped to comprehend Crocker-Harris’s dilemma. In bringing the play and its previous adaptation into a contemporary context, the remake has incorporated stylistic and thematic concerns related to the contemporary heritage films that present a tension between drama and mise en scène, between what they articulate narratively and what they present visually . . . At the level of the image . . . an exclusive elite English version of national heritage is displayed as well as its finery. Visually the impression is that England is a wonderful, desirable place of tradition and privilege. At the level of narrative . . . that heritage is often unstable, at risk, in disarray.39

While the remake is in dialogue with the earlier play and film adaptation, it produces a different cinematic text, as the term “remake” suggests – one that is an eclectic, even wistful, spectacle of the wonders of the English past contrasted to an unstable present. The “recuperation” of CrockerHarris is also ambivalent, placing stress on his personal integrity and affirmation of traditional values, while also dramatizing their tenuousness in the present. Notes 1. The first stage performance of The Browning Version was at the Phoenix Theatre in 1948, The Winslow Boy at Lyric Theatre, London in 1946. See Geoffrey Wansell, Terence Rattigan (London: Fourth Estate, 1995): 422–423 and 426. 2. See Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson, Terence Rattigan: The Man and His Work (London: Quartet Books, 1979): 167. Other plays, though much less prominently, have been adapted to or remade on film and/or TV: French Without Tears (1940); The Deep Blue Sea (1955); and Separate Tables (1958, 1974, 1983 for BBC TV), The Sleeping Prince as The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe (1957).

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3. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classical Novel (Manchester University Press, 2002): 36. 4. See Tom Ryall’s illuminating discussion of the character and significance of adaptation to British cinema in Anthony Asquith (Manchester University Press, 2005): 121–141. 5. For significant recent studies of adaptation, see Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited; Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Dudley Andrew, “Introduction,” in Narrative Strategies: Original Essays in Film and Prose Fiction, ed. Syndy M. Conger and Janice R. Welsch (Macomb, IL: Western Illinois University Press, 1980): 9–19; Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); see also Imelda Whelehan, “Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemma,” in Adaptations: From Text to Screen and Screen to Text, ed. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London: Routledge, 1999): 3–21. 6. B. A. Young, The Rattigan Version: The Theatre of Character (New York: Athenaeum, 1988); Susan Rusinko, Terence Rattigan (Boston: Twayne, 1983). 7. Wansell, Terence Rattigan: 50, 149. 8. Darlow and Hodson, Terence Rattigan: 46. 9. Ibid. 10. Wansell, Terence Rattigan: 402. 11. Ryall, Anthony Asquith: 164–165. 12. Jeffrey Richards, Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (Manchester University Press, 1988): 251–265. 13. See Simon Raven, The Old School (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986). 14. Young, The Rattigan Version: 74; Wansell, Terence Rattigan: 171–172. 15. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society (London: Longman, 1981): 239–240. 16. Terence Rattigan, Playbill: Comprising “The Browning Version” and “Harlequinade” (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949): 7. Subsequent references to the play are placed in parentheses. 17. Darlow and Hodson, Terence Rattigan: 167. 18. Ryall, Anthony Asquith: 162–163. 19. Ibid., 124. 20. Ibid., 125. 21. Alan Strachan, Secret Dreams: The Biography of Michael Redgrave (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004): 156, 161–164. 22. Ibid., 265. 23. Young, The Rattigan Version: 80. 24. Darlow and Hudson, Terence Rattigan: 160–161. 25. “New Films in London,” The Times, issue 51953, col. E (Monday, March 19, 1951): 2. 26. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School (New York: Viking Press, 1977): 142–143. 27. Ibid., 215. 28. Ryall, Anthony Asquith: 134.

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29. Darlow and Hodson, Terence Rattigan: 160. B. A. Young expresses a similar objection, The Rattigan Version: 81. 30. Wansell, Terence Rattigan: 213. 31. Strachan, Secret Dreams: 267. 32. The version of the play starring Judi Dench and Ian Holm was briefly commented on in “Judy – Bitchy Hit in A Not So Fine Romance,” Daily Express, December 31, 1985: 23. Lucy Hughes Hallett, in “Misogynist Nightmare,” Daily Standard (1985), as the title indicates, described the play as “objectionable” though “well-made” and praised the production “as bringing out all the pathos of this petty tragedy.” It is clear that the play in contemporary views is considered predominantly as a domestic drama. 33. An Australian review cites an interview with Ridley Scott that refers to this version as “doing the remake.” See Mary Colbert, “Hollywood Puts A New Shine on An Old Movie Classic,” Sunday Morning Herald, News and Features, (February 13, 1995): 13. 34. Robert Eberwein, “Remakes and Cultural Studies,” in Play It Again, Sam: Remakes on Remakes, ed. Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998): 15. 35. See Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama Since 1980 (Oxford University Press, 2003). 36. Mary Colbert, “Hollywood Puts A New Shine”: 13; Myron Meisel, “The Browning Version,” Film Journal, 97 (1994): 76–77. 37. Stanley Kauffmann, “Careering Along,” New Republic (October 31, 1994): 38. 38. Geoffrey Macnab, “The Browning Version, 1994,” Sight and Sound (November 1994): 42. 39. Higson, English Heritage: 77.

chapter 5

Screening for serious people a trivial comedy: Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest Tom Ryall

[Asquith’s The Importance of Being Earnest,] if not the triumphant re-creation that its makers had planned, was a beautifully composed and delightfully acted film – completely successful neither as cinema nor theatre, but nevertheless a striking landmark in its own limbo.1

The Importance of Being Earnest, an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde society comedy from the 1890s, directed by Anthony Asquith and released in the middle of 1952, can be located within a number of different contexts. It was part of the popular culture of a society in between “the age of austerity” marked by postwar recovery and radical political social and economic reconstruction, and a more affluent consumer-orientated age ushered in by events such as the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. The film was produced by an industry also in recovery and in receipt of new sources of finance from the state and from the American majors to supplement the traditional sources of funding, the major British film studios such as the Rank Organization and the Associated British Picture Corporation. The British cinema of the 1950s, it has been argued, was marked by “a relatively stable industrial environment with a strong American presence” and was “the last example of a massmarket cinema with a strong British production element”;2 it was, however, also a cinema facing a decline in audiences as social and cultural changes (the postwar baby boom, suburbanization, television) began to change leisure patterns. The film was part of a national cinema that had acquired something of a distinctive identity during the Second World War – though for documentary and realist qualities rather than the satire and artificiality of the Wilde play. It was also part of a national cinema which had a lengthy, though often criticized tradition of using the theatre and literature as source material, and was released in a year when just under a third of the 100 or so films made in Britain were drawn from the stage.3 There is also the context of the director’s work. By the early 1950s Asquith had been making films for 85

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about twenty-five years in a range of genres from his innovative silent work to one of the most prestigious Second World War titles, The Way to the Stars. By 1952 he had acquired a reputation as a skilled and tasteful adapter of stage drama with films such as the 1938 version of Shaw’s Pygmalion which he co-directed with actor Leslie Howard and the Terence Rattigan adaptations, e.g. French Without Tears and The Browning Version, made in close collaboration with the playwright. A further context is provided by the history of gay film. Wilde, of course, was a homosexual, famously subjected to trial and imprisonment, and is now a key figure in the history of gay culture. Asquith himself, though little has been written about his private life, is usually regarded as a latent homosexual. There is a degree of biographical convergence between the two artists. Though Asquith was born two years after Wilde’s death, they had similar social backgrounds. Wilde knew and met socially with both Herbert Asquith, the director’s politician father, and his mother Margot, a well-known figure in the London cultural and artistic circles of the time. On a somber note, Herbert Asquith, in his capacity as Home Secretary, was Wilde’s prosecutor in 1895, and, in more benign times, the playwright dedicated one of his short stories to Margot as well as writing several poems for her.4 The Importance of Being Earnest is a film made during a period of social transition by a film industry which, despite being faced with a decline in cinema-going, did achieve a degree of stability with a mixture of consistent investment by the major British companies, state finance, and American investment. It is a “prestige” film with powerful literary credentials, an adaptation of a canonical British play – “Oscar Wilde’s most famous and – posthumously – most successful play.”5 But it also belongs to a period in British cinema which has been described as “perhaps the most derided decade in British film history.”6

A British production The Importance of Being Earnest reflects the complex sources of financing for British films of the period. In the late 1940s the government introduced a number of measures to assist British production, including establishing the National Film Finance Corporation, effectively a state-financed film bank. Although the film begins with Rank’s familiar icon – “The Man with the Gong” – it was actually financed by British Filmmakers, a joint venture set up in 1951 by the NFCC and the Rank Organisation, in a co-production arrangement with the independent company Javelin Films and producer Teddy Baird. The major studio backing was supplemented by state finance,

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but the film was produced by an independent company and an independent producer with whom Asquith had a long history of collaboration. The cast included a number of prominent British stage actors, though no real British film stars. Edith Evans reprised her famous performance as Lady Bracknell on the London stage a decade or so previously, while Michael Redgrave and Michael Denison, who claims in his autobiography to have been instrumental in the genesis of the project,7 played the romantic bachelors. The objects of their attention, the young women, were played by Joan Greenwood and newcomer Dorothy Tutin in her first film role. However, the screenplay was effectively written by Oscar Wilde, an Anglo-Irishman (albeit one who spent his professional life in London and became a significant part of England’s literary tradition). Though another screenwriter was initially involved, the script was prepared mainly by Asquith, but the eventual screenplay consisted largely of Wilde’s dialogue from the original with minor alterations and some excisions. Indeed, maybe in deference to Wilde, Asquith became embroiled in an argument with the Screenwriters Association when he declined to take a screenwriting credit for his work.8 The film’s prologue – a couple seating themselves in a theatre – does feature an enlarged insert proclaiming “Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest,” but the technical credits that appear at the end of the film contain no reference to screenwriting at all. Wilde’s Irish origins, of course, complicate the notion of a completely British production, though the writer does occupy a very secure place in the history of English literature.

Film, theatre, and the 1950s The British cinema of the 1950s is “widely perceived as being a dull period – an interregnum sandwiched between the inventive 1940s and the exciting 1960s.”9 Harsher criticism came from Lindsay Anderson, who attacked 1950s British films for their Southern English metropolitan middle-class qualities. As he insisted, “it is necessary to point out that it is an English cinema” which was “snobbish, anti-intelligent, emotionally inhibited, wilfully blind to the conditions and problems of the present, dedicated to an out-of-date, exhausted national ideal.”10 For Anderson and many others, it was a cinema of bland insular comedies (Ealing, Genevieve, Norman Wisdom films, the Doctor series), of jingoistic war films (Angels One Five, The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky), of dull but worthy social problem pictures (I Believe in You, Woman in a Dressing Gown, Sapphire). It was also, as much of previous British cinema, shackled to an influential literary and theatrical culture and especially to London’s West End stage. However,

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recent writers have gone beyond the generalizations deriving from such a jaundiced view of British cinema to discover a bolder and more imaginative cinema. Comedies such as The Naked Truth, The Maggie, and The Ladykillers have been seen as less bland and darker in theme than is often supposed, and, it is suggested, “ordinary” films such as The Browning Version, Hobson’s Choice, The Man Between, The Long Arm, and Dance Hall display evidence of “pictorial skill” and “visual bravura,” qualities frequently assumed to be absent from the British cinema of the time.11 It was also a period when British films were popular with audiences and competing successfully with Hollywood: British cinema was connecting with its home audience more successfully than at any time in its history, culminating in the quite extraordinary statistic (inconceivable today) that the top twelve box-office films of 1959 in Britain were all actually made in Britain.12

For some it was a transitional period in British cinema, during which the various social changes of the era – the advent of a consumer society, the breakdown in social deference, the interrogation of traditional values, growing egalitarianism, social and sexual fluidities – found a voice in some of the comedies and war films of the period and paved the way for the more radical working-class representation in the cinema of the New Wave, for the “more explicit celebrations of working-class energy”13 to be found in films such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Alternatively, the 1950s paved the way for the emergence of the irreverent and subversive popular film cycles inaugurated by The Curse of Frankenstein and Carry on Sergeant toward the end of the decade, “the lost continent” of British cinema overlooked by critics and historians whose focus tended to be on the social realist lineage deriving from the Griersonian documentary traditions of the 1930s.14 The most salient category for a consideration of The Importance of Being Earnest, of course, is the theatrical adaptation, and although other genres and cycles – comedies, war films – tend to dominate general descriptions of 1950s British cinema, film versions of stage plays were a prominent feature of the decade. Indeed, one source has estimated “that of the 1,033 British films of the 1950s . . . some 152 were based on stage plays.”15 The film was one of many British-produced drama adaptations in 1952, when almost onethird of the annual releases were based on routine popular plays from the postwar period; though there were exceptions, such as the adaptations of plays by T. S. Eliot and Noël Coward. There were also film versions of two

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plays from the 1890s with particular resonance for Wilde’s own work – Charley’s Aunt (Brandon Thomas) and The Second Mrs. Tanqueray (Arthur Wing Pinero). Asquith was a prominent exponent of theatrical adaptation, and of his ten films released in the 1950s five were adaptations from stage plays and one, The Final Test, was adapted from a television play. The list of playwrights drawn upon include Asquith’s long-time collaborator, Terence Rattigan (The Browning Version) and George Bernard Shaw (The Doctor’s Dilemma); and, in many respects, the Asquith adaptations reflect the metropolitan middle-class bias noted by Anderson. For example, The Browning Version is set in a traditional English public school, Carrington VC is centered on an army officer, The Doctor’s Dilemma is both about bohemian life and Harley Street doctors, and The Importance of Being Earnest is set in the town and country-house world of the upper-middle classes and the aristocracy. Anderson’s vituperative rhetoric aside, such a repertoire was certainly on the conservative side, especially compared with the radical dramatic developments of the decade, and the work of John Osborne and Samuel Beckett. The adaptations of Rattigan and Shaw, and of popular dramatists such as Dorothy and Christie Campbell, locate Asquith as a middlebrow artist with an approach to making films characterized by its “reliance on literary sources, its restraint, its formal conservatism, its provincialism, its concern with middle-class characters.”16 Though Asquith’s early films from the silent period did display both an awareness and an embrace of radical avant-garde film culture (and a readiness to depict ordinary life as opposed to the middle-class focus of the middlebrow), both the experimental dimension and the mundane subject matter can be seen to recede as his career progressed.

Play and film – structure and dialogue As noted above, The Importance of Being Earnest belongs to a longstanding strand of the British film industry in which the country’s rich heritage of literary and dramatic culture has provided a wide variety of source material ranging from Shakespeare to popular farces, from Noël Coward to George Bernard Shaw, from lowbrow melodrama to the verbal wit of Oscar Wilde. Even in the silent era the theatre provided much material for the visual art of the silent film. “In the twenties,” as producer Michael Balcon wryly noted in his autobiography, “we were to a great extent mentally ‘stage-bound.’ We looked to the theatre for much of our screen material and our early films

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would certainly now be called ‘stagey.’”17 Balcon’s commonsense reservations – the basing of an art form which lacks dialogue on one for which the word is of primary importance – have been elaborated in subsequent critical commentary on British cinema. Often the theatrical influence (including the use of stage actors for the screen) has been construed as a negative force, stifling cinematic evolution, confining the British film to the “theatrical,” making British films “stagey,” in Balcon’s terms. The accusation of “canned theatre” has been levelled at drama adaptations, especially those drawn from middlebrow and high culture, from Coward and Shakespeare, implying that the specificities of the film medium have been neglected in deference to the dramatic source text. In many respects the critical reception of Asquith’s film was underpinned by such assumptions. For example, Milton Shulman’s review in the London Evening Standard found that the play was “perfect stuff for the cramped and artificial limitations of the stage where the words are the thing. But is it for the cinema, with its emphasis on visual action and a semblance of reality?”18 Fellow critic Jympson Harman, writing in the London Evening News, commented that Asquith “should not be deceiving himself about photographed stage plays. We must look for the time when he will once more believe like any other true screen artist that the business of film technique is to tell a story pictorially.”19 To an extent, the “photographed stage play” point is confirmed in the film’s framing scene, a couple seating themselves in a theatre just prior to a performance of Wilde’s play (Illustration 5.1), complemented by a return to the curtain descending on the stage in the film’s final shot. Do these devices signal the intention to present the play in the relatively unmediated fashion pinpointed in the

5.1 Asquith’s film announces its theatricality with a short pre-credit sequence featuring extravagantly dressed theatregoers occupying a private box.

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reviews, to suppress the cinematic in favor of the theatrical? The opening certainly acknowledges the theatrical origins of the work; the curtain begins to rise, and the woman picks up her opera glasses; the next shot is “on stage,” with Jack Worthing (Michael Redgrave) sitting in his bath. Initially out of focus and with a binocular mask, the shot is part of a point-of-view sequence; and although other aspects of the opening images – the welldressed couple, the theatre box, the program, the proscenium arch, the curtain rising – connote the bourgeois theatre of the kind in which the play opened in 1895 (the St. James’s Theatre, London), the “cinematic” is present in the deployment of a familiar film device – the point-of-view shot. The film follows Wilde’s text very closely, though, with some minor alterations. In the play the entire First Act takes place in Algernon Moncrieff ’s “flat in Half-Moon Street,” but the film begins in Jack Worthing’s flat with Jack and Algernon’s discussion of Gwendolen, Jack’s cigarette case, Cecily, and the “Bunburyist” deception strategy (Illustrations 5.2 and 5.3). The film then moves to Algernon’s flat, but there is a brief scene of Jack arriving at Algernon’s apartment together with further conversation between Jack and Algernon before Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen arrive for tea, a change which involved some repositioning of the play’s dialogue. For example, the discussion of “cucumber sandwiches, bread and butter and Gwendolen” from early in the play has to be placed later in the film, to when the location shifts to Algernon’s flat. The Second Act follows the play, moving to the garden of Jack Worthing’s Manor House at Woolton and introducing Cecily and Miss Prism, but there is a slight change to the sequence of events. Miss Prism and the Reverend Canon Chasuble’s discussion and walk (which are split in the play) are run together into a single

5.2 Jack Worthing (Michael Redgrave) is in love with Gwendolen (Joan Greenwood), but their relationship is compromised by John’s double life.

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5.3 Algernon (Michael Denison) has it in his power to assure his friend Jack’s romantic happiness, and Jack, as it turns out, holds a similar power over him.

scene for the film. The arrival of Algernon is delayed slightly, and his two scenes with Cecily are run together, to be followed directly by Jack’s arrival in mourning dress and a discussion between him, Miss Prism, and Canon Chasuble about his recently deceased brother Ernest (the play divides the scenes with Miss Prism’s walk). In the play the scene continues with Jack discussing baptism with Canon Chasuble, but this is repositioned to later in the film, and the scene continues with Cecily’s entrance to announce that Ernest is, in fact, in the dining room. In the film, Jack’s discussion about his proposed christening takes place in Chasuble’s office and follows Algernon’s conversation with Cecily (her diary), and the final shot of the sequence is of Algernon arriving at Chasuble’s office (presumably to arrange his own christening). The beginning of Act Three from the play – Cecily and Gwendolen watching Jack and Algernon in conversation (“muffins and christening”) – is repositioned in the film, occurring slightly earlier as an intercut shot. Thereafter, play and film converge for the arrival of Lady Bracknell and the finale, in which all identities are revealed and conflicts are resolved. In addition to the small structural changes, the film diverges from the play in some further minor respects. Some of the dialogue from the play is omitted entirely; examples include the omission of the opening page or so of the play (a discussion between Algernon and his manservant about champagne and marriage) and of the more extended discussion of “Bunburyism” just before the arrival of Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen early in the play. There are many examples where individual speeches are truncated; for example, when Algernon uses his “Bunbury” excuse to miss a dinner engagement with Aunt Augusta, her response (about fourteen lines in the

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play) is limited to around six lines in the film. There are numerous less drastic alterations – words omitted, sentences altered in structure – and the occasional substitution of words. For example, when Algernon promises to reform himself, Cecily says, “It is rather Quixotic of you”; the film changes this to “It is rather romantic of you.” In the play, when Jack tells Lady Bracknell that Algernon is of dubious moral character, she protests, “Impossible. He is an Oxonian”; in the film the line becomes, “He was at Oxford.” In both cases more familiar words are substituted for the originals. In addition to such changes to the text of the play, there is some additional material, including a new “character,” Seton (Jack’s manservant) and a number of inserted shots – Jack in a Hansom Cab arriving at Algernon’s flat, Algernon on the train going to Woolton Manor, and Lady Bracknell also on the train going to the Manor. Although it may be argued that the various changes are not significant in terms of the original Wilde play, they do suggest that Asquith did quite a thorough job of adapting the play, despite his refusal of a screen credit.

Play and film – style and presentation The negative implications of referring to a film as a “photographed stage play” have been unpacked succinctly by Stephen Lacey. To call a film “theatrical” implies a number of things: An over-reliance on the “word,” the residue of the literary text which is privileged over the visual image. “Theatricality” may connote a style of acting that seems scaled towards the open spaces of a theatre auditorium rather than the enforced intimacy of the camera; more generally, it suggests an “artificiality” in performance (judged against the criteria of realism, that is) . . . “Theatrical” may also mean “flatness” in the construction of space, as if the camera is afraid to move through the fourth wall and interrupt an established environment . . . “theatrical” is sometimes used to describe the lack of an integrated mise-en-scène . . . “theatrical” also connotes a preference for studio over location, and a reliance on a shooting system that is dominated by the mid-shot and discrete and minimal editing.20

Two interrelated factors are isolated here that define the differences between film and theatre: firstly, acting and performance, and secondly, the manipulation of the cinematic space within which the acting and verbal delivery occurs, the style of shooting. The cast of The Importance of Being Earnest was drawn primarily from actors with varying degrees of film experience, but many were well known for their work on the stage in prestigious theatre companies such as the Old Vic and the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, as

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well as London’s West End theatre. Michael Redgrave and Margaret Rutherford had been working in the cinema since the 1930s, Michael Denison and Joan Greenwood since the early 1940s, and Edith Evans, though appearing in a handful of silent films around 1915, had only returned to the cinema in the late 1940s. At the other end of the age spectrum, Dorothy Tutin was making her first film after beginning a stage career in 1949. Michael Balcon had suggested that the British cinema “looked to the theatre for much of our screen material,” and although he was thinking of the plays on which British films were based, he might also have added the extensive use of actors from the West End Theatre community. British film studios were located in the London suburbs very close to London’s West End, and, as Geoff Brown has noted, “[a]ctors could film during the day and be back in their stage dressing-rooms by early evening.”21 The issue of acting style is sharply focused in film by the decision to cast Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, in which she effectively reproduces her 1939 performance in John Gielgud’s famous production at London’s Globe Theatre (renamed the Gielgud Theatre in 1994). It is usually regarded as the definitive performance of the role and one that has acquired an iconic status in relation to the play. As Russell Jackson has suggested: Edith Evans’s performance in Anthony Asquith’s 1952 film has coloured public perception of this scene to the extent that, like Hamlet, The Importance of being Earnest now includes a speech – in fact, two words – which audiences are likely to utter before a performer can speak.22

Indeed, Karel Reisz argued that her performance unbalanced the film for her fellow actors by refusing to acknowledge the differences between film and theatre for actors: Dame Edith demonstrates her utter contempt for those who would have their screen acting different from the theatre and makes the other actors, with their more refined camera technique, appear a little thin-blooded when they are forced to share the screen with her.23

Asquith himself noted that stage actors new to film often fail to appreciate the character of film acting and over-project, and this certainly describes the film’s Lady Bracknell. Yet, in his unpublished notebooks, he defends Edith Evans, suggesting that her “over-life size performance was desirable,” at least as a record of a notable stage performance.24 However, Reisz’s review hints at the problems faced by the other actors, and the director as well, in achieving a consistency of acting style for the film, a point taken up by Richard Findlater in his biography of Michael Redgrave:

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Redgrave’s attempts to present his acting within a convention of seminaturalism would, I think, have been more generally admired if that convention had been more unanimously respected; in the context of the acting he seemed all-too-scrupulously avoiding the theatrical extravagance in which the other players indulged; and, although it was an admirable demonstration of subtle adjustments in scale, it failed in the last resort because of loyalty to a lost cause.25

The contrast between Michael Redgrave’s performance and that of Edith Evans was especially extreme and, to his biographer’s mind, detrimental to both actor and film. While most of the cast displayed the “artificiality in performance” mentioned by Lacey, Redgrave’s restrained delivery, his unmannered style, and his avoidance of “theatrical extravagance” sat uneasily with the general performance thrust of the film. In addition to considerations of text, structure, and performance, the presentation of a play on the cinema screen involves issues of space, location, spectator viewpoint, and “realism.” The primacy of the verbal in the theatre means that a stage set requires only a minimal iconography to provide an adequate location for drama. Films, however, can “open out” the space of a play and, indeed, as Russell Jackson has suggested, it “has been customary to regard it as an imperative in film that there should be movement among locations, which involves ‘opening out’ a stage script.”26 Wilde’s plays had been filmed on a number of occasions since the silent period, and there were two adaptations made in the late 1940s shortly before Asquith’s film. Both “opened out” their source texts, though in different ways. Alexander Korda’s An Ideal Husband had a prologue and epilogue set in Hyde Park and scenes resituated in different locations to provide variety, while The Fan, directed by Otto Preminger, framed its source (Lady Windermere’s Fan) in contemporary postwar London, with an elderly Mrs. Erlynne recounting Wilde’s story in flashback to Lord Darlington. However, Jackson has also suggested that Wilde’s plays, which he describes as “realistic, scenic theatre,” are difficult to open out “because an organising principle of the original is that as many significant turns of event as possible should take place in a limited number of locations within a given period of time.”27 Although Asquith strayed a little from the limited locations in the Wilde play, introducing John Worthing’s London flat, Canon Chasuble’s study, a street exterior outside Algernon’s flat, and a couple of inserted shots in train carriages, the film follows the confined pattern of the “realistic, scenic theatre.” For the most part the film consists of a series of lengthy scenes usually involving two characters (occasionally more), unified in time and space.

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“Opening out” a play, however, does not exhaust the possibilities for transforming a piece of theatre into a “cinematic” text. Cinematic style applies to the presentation of dramatic material, albeit in its confined “theatrical” space. The continuity of a scene on the stage can be subjected to cinematic découpage, broken into elements (different kinds of shots in terms of scale and movement) and reconstituted in a different form from that experienced in the environment of the theatre. As André Bazin commented: If by cinema we understand liberty of action in regard to space, and freedom to choose your angle of approach to the action, then filming a play should give the setting a breadth and reality unattainable on the stage. It would also free the spectator from his seat and by varying the shots give an added quality to the action.28

The director’s “liberty of action” offers choices, in fact a spectrum of choices, ranging from “simply photographing the staged performance on stage space,” in which a play is effectively documented on film with minimal attention to the cinematic opportunity, to an approach in which the cinema brings its own spatial potential to bear on the material to effect an entire visual transformation by moving the action from the confines of theatrical enclosure and creating new relationships between actor and décor, between space and time and between the dramatic presentation and the audience.29

Two considerations arise in the analysis of the specifics of cinema style in The Importance of Being Earnest. The first is Asquith’s directorial style, his approach to mise en scène, to the deployment of cinematic space in relation to the actors and vocal delivery. Asquith, a sophisticated cinematic stylist, was schooled in the silent cinema of the 1920s and was aware of the various experimental tendencies of the period – montage, the mobile subjective camera, expressionist lighting, and so on – though working within the commercial British cinema tended to iron out such tendencies in favor of the conventional continuity system. The second is the “theatrical” style, which is in some respects invited or imposed by the very process of adaptation from stage plays in general, and in particular from what Jackson noted about the specific qualities of Wilde’s “realistic, scenic theatre.” The constraints of adaptation displayed themselves in a number of ways. Michael Denison (Algernon) noted that “we filmed in quite large chunks, which was different from the normal method of filming. There are lots of quite long takes in it, not a lot of elaborate cutting.”30 The long take, the unbroken presentation of the integral space of the drama, “a reliance on a shooting system that is dominated by the mid-shot and discrete and

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minimal editing,” as Lacey puts it, is often assumed to be the appropriate shooting strategy for stage adaptation. Yet on examination, Asquith’s film deploys both the long take, which emphasizes continuous space, and also more conventional continuity editing utilizing the shot-countershot figure, and a range of shot-scales, including the close-up. In fact, the overall Average Shot Length (ASL) for the film is 12.8 seconds, which is not unusually long, and although ASL measurements can be misleading, this does not indicate an over-reliance on the long take.31 Some scenes are built around longer “theatrical” takes with brief inserted shots, while others employ greater variation in shot scale together with a more emphatic use of editing. An example of the former is the scene with Cecily, Miss Prism, and the Reverend Chasuble from the beginning of Act Two of the play. The scene runs for just over six minutes and contains nine shots. It begins with a few relatively brief shots, then frames Cecily and Miss Prism at the garden table preparing for a German lesson. Their conversation at the table is divided into two lengthy shots of well over one minute each, with a brief insert of Algernon on the train heading for the Manor. They are joined by the Reverend Chasuble, and another lengthy shot ensues lasting just under two minutes. Miss Prism joins Chasuble for a walk, and there is another long take of their conversation lasting just under a minute. It is a scene such as this that critics usually characterize as “theatrical” – shots which last one minute plus, framing generally “mid-shot,” static camera with movement confined to reframing – and its ASL of 42 seconds confirms the stress on the long take. The garden scene can be contrasted with the most famous scene in the play – the “handbag” episode – in which Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack Worthing about his background and ancestry. It is of comparable length, around seven minutes, but contains just under sixty shots, as compared to the garden scene’s nine. The ASL for the scene is around 8 seconds, with most of the shots brief in duration as part of a series of shot/countershot exchanges between Lady Bracknell and Jack. The exceptions are a small number of shots lasting over one minute for some of Lady Bracknell’s more substantial utterances, including her comment that Jack’s origins “display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.” The confrontational nature of the scene is complemented by the shot/countershot structure.

Asquith and gay culture Wilde’s play has a key, though contingent role in the history of gay culture and politics. On the opening night – February 14, 1895 – at the St. James’s

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Theatre, the Marquess of Queensbury (Lord Alfred Douglas’s father) planned to demonstrate against Wilde, and though he failed to gain entrance to the theatre, he subsequently sent the playwright the infamous annotated calling card with its suggestion that Wilde was a sodomite.32 This action led to Wilde’s unsuccessful libel case against Queensbury and ultimately his trials under the Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) for “gross indecency” and his subsequent imprisonment. More than fifty years later, Asquith’s film was released into a similarly hostile and homophobic context. As Andrew Marr has noted, “[t]here was a great purge of homosexuals going on in the Britain of the fifties, whipped up by the newspapers and by a clique of politicians and officials.”33 Wilde’s status as a prominent homosexual was, of course, paraded before society in the law courts; Asquith’s close personal and professional relationship with Terence Rattigan suggests that he moved in “the semi-open gay world in theatrical circles”34 though, according to Asquith’s biographer, Rattigan himself said that “I knew Puffin as well as anyone could know him for close on thirty years, and to my personal knowledge there was never even the vaguest sign of any homosexuality.”35 Nevertheless, some critics have incorporated the director in the history of “pre-gay British film”36 as an important member of “an exhilarating gallery of heroes and heroines” that figure in the hidden history of gay and lesbian contributions to the British cinema.37 Gay perspectives on both play and film derive partly from a rereading of heterosexual relationships in gay terms on the assumption that because both playwright and film director were gay, then “queerness, like murder, will out, so there must be a gay scenario lurking somewhere in the depths of The Importance of Being Earnest.”38 Such readings of the film rest partly on credible assumptions about authorship and sensibility but mainly on the textual characteristics transferred from a play described by Jack Babuscio as “the story of two men who engage in dandyish dating of females as a convenient cover-up for the pursuit of ‘Bunburying,’ i.e. illicit and, it is strenuously suggested, homosexual pleasures.”39 Though writers such as Sinfield and Medhurst are duly cautious about seeking gay subtexts in ostensibly heterosexual tales, the latter has suggested convincingly that “Brief Encounter shows Noël Coward displacing his own fears, anxieties and pessimism about the possibility of a fulfilled sexual relationship within an oppressively homophobic culture by transposing them into a heterosexual context.”40 Asquith’s adaptation of Wilde’s play retains the theme of forbidden love, which is important for Babuscio’s reading of the play and the depiction of “effeminate,” dandy men. Sinfield sees this as the key

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characteristic of Wilde’s world that authorizes “gay” readings, at least for gay readers: Wilde’s principal male characters do look and sound like the mid-twentiethcentury stereotype of the queer man (I am using “queer” to evoke this historical figure). They are effete, camp, leisured or aspiring to be, aesthetic, amoral, witty, insouciant, charming, spiteful, dandified. If these characters are not offered as homosexual (and generally they are pursuing women characters), the whole ambiance reeks, none the less, of queerness. Or, rather, it does for us.41

Asquith and Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest was released and marketed as a commercial picture with an extensive advertising campaign both in the trade press, with several full-page pictures of the film’s stars accompanied by epigrams from the play,42 and in popular film magazines such as Picturegoer. The film opened at the Odeon Leicester Square, a flagship Rank Organization cinema, with a premiere attended by stars and personalities dressed in Victorian costume and arriving in vintage cars.43 However, the campaign also extended to broadsheet newspapers (Observer, The Times), as well as intellectual journals such as The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman and Nation. It was not among the most successful releases of 1952, falling behind both Hollywood hits (The Greatest Show on Earth), British based “runaways” (Ivanhoe), and a number of domestic titles (Angels One Five, Mandy). The film made little impression in terms of international awards, though it did win a minor award (the Bronze Lion of San Marco) at the Venice Film Festival for its art director, Carmen Dillon. Although marketed as a commercial film, The Importance of Being Earnest belongs to a prominent specialist strand of postwar British cinema – the “literary or theatrical adaptation that was bringing such prestige to British cinema of the period.”44 Such films, which included David Lean’s Dickens and Coward films, as well as Carol Reed’s adaptations of Graham Greene, were culturally ambitious and aimed at the kind of audiences who read the broadsheet newspapers and the intellectual journals. As McFarlane has noted: It was not just that these films were derived from writers of high cultural status; the kind of adaptation strategies they exhibited indicated a strong respect for the precursor text, and there was about them a degree of sophistication in the writing and filming that marked them out as fare for discriminating audiences.45

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Asquith’s film, described as “sophisticated adult entertainment” in Karel Reisz’s review, trades very heavily on Wilde’s “biographical legend,” the amalgam of plays and other writings, the writer’s highly public historical status, and the volume of commentary, criticism, and analysis that his work and life has prompted. These elements dictate the identity of the film as a prestigious adaptation capitalizing on the substantial reputation of the play’s author. In some senses, the film is atypical of Asquith’s work, and the film reflects Wilde’s preoccupations with the manners and conventions of the late Victorian English upper classes in his society comedies and his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Asquith’s films often scrutinized the solid and respectable middle-class world of bank clerks (The Winslow Boy), army officers (Carrington VC), public schoolmasters (The Browning Version), and doctors (The Doctor’s Dilemma), with occasional forays into workingclass life (Underground, A Cottage on Dartmoor) early in his career. The degree of sobriety, seriousness, and realism in such films contrasts with the flamboyance and satirical distance evident in Wilde’s somewhat barbed depiction of the upper classes in late Victorian society, his “trivial comedy for serious people.” Wilde’s play is now regarded as an innovative play, “a radical departure from earlier forms of drama” containing “the beginnings of a theatre of ‘alienation’ or ‘estrangement’ which would become the cornerstone of European modernism, especially in the drama of Bertolt Brecht.”46 Asquith’s film adaptation presents a polished version of Wilde’s play and captures the famously eccentric performance of Edith Evans, but whether it lives up to the revolutionary credentials of Wilde’s play is questionable. Notes 1. Richard Findlater, Michael Redgrave, Actor (London: William Heinemann, 1956): 112. 2. Roy Stafford, “‘What’s Showing at the Gaumont?’: Rethinking the Study of British Cinema in the 1950s,” Journal of Popular British Cinema, 4 (2001): 109. 3. Statistics taken from Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue 1895–1985 (London: David and Charles, 1986). 4. Colin Clifford, The Asquiths (London: John Murray, 2002): 22. 5. Russell Jackson, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge University Press, 1997): 161. 6. Ian Mackillop and Neil Sinyard, “Celebrating British Cinema of the 1950s,” in British Cinema of the 1950s, ed. Mackillop and Sinyard (Manchester University Press, 2003): 2. 7. Michael Denison, Double Act (London: Michael Joseph, 1985): 20–21.

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8. Correspondence, Baird Collection, BFI. Letters in the Teddy Baird Collection (British Film Institute Special Collections, Item 29, The Importance of Being Earnest File). 9. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s (Oxford University Press, 2003): 1. 10. Lindsay Anderson, “Get Out and Push,” in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (St. Albans: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957): 139. Emphasis in original. 11. Mackillop and Sinyard, “Celebrating British Cinema of the 1950s”: 4–6. 12. Ibid., 2. 13. Harper and Porter, British Cinema: 267. 14. Julian Petley, “The Lost Continent,” in All Our Yesterdays, ed. Charles Barr (London: BFI, 1986): 98. 15. Stephen Lacey, “Too Theatrical by Half? The Admiral Crichton and Look Back in Anger,” in British Cinema of the 1950s, ed. Mackillop and Sinyard: 157. 16. Lawrence Napper, “British Cinema and the Middlebrow,” in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000): 110. 17. Michael Balcon, Michael Balcon Presents . . . A Lifetime of Films (London: Hutchinson, 1969): 27. 18. 26.2.52, BFI Press Cuttings microfiche collection. 19. Ibid. 20. Lacey, “Too Theatrical by Half?”: 159–160. 21. Geoff Brown, “‘Sister of the Stage’: British Film and British Theatre,” in All Our Yesterdays, ed. Barr: 145. 22. Jackson, “The Importance of Being Earnest”: 170. 23. Karel Reisz, “Review: The Importance of Being Earnest,” Sight and Sound, 22.1 (1952): 28. 24. Anthony Asquith, Anthony Asquith Collection (British Film Institute Special Collections, Notebooks, Item 2): n.d. 25. Findlater, Michael Redgrave: 113. 26. Russell Jackson, “From Play-Script to Screenplay,” in The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby (Cambridge University Press, 1997): 19. 27. Ibid. 28. Andre Bazin, What is Cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967): 86. 29. Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge University Press, 1990): 9. 30. Brian McFarlane, Sixty Voices (London: BFI, 1992): 77. 31. The ASL ratings were done with the Cinemetrics software available at the website www.cinemetrics.lv/cinemetrics.php. 32. Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988): 411–412. 33. Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (London: Pan Books, 2008): 135. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. R. J. Minney, Puffin Asquith (London: Leslie Frewin, 1973): 163.

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36. Andy Medhurst, “In Search of Nebulous Nancies: Looking for Queers in PreGay British Film,” in British Queer Cinema, ed. Robin Griffiths (London: Routledge, 2006): 23. 37. Stephen Bourne, Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema, 1930–1971 (London: Cassell, 1996): x. 38. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994): vi. 39. Quoted in Stephen Bourne, “Behind the Masks: Anthony Asquith and Brian Desmond Hurst,” in British Queer Cinema, ed. Griffiths: 39. 40. Andy Medhurst, “That Special Thrill: Brief Encounter, Homosexuality and Authorship,” Screen, 32.2 (1991): 198. 41. Sinfield, The Wilde Century: vi. 42. Kine Weekly, May 15, 1952: [no page number]. 43. Kine Weekly, July 10, 1952: 58. 44. Brian McFarlane, “Outrage: No Orchids for Miss Blandish,” in British Crime Cinema, ed. Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (London: Routledge, 1999): 41–42. 45. Ibid., 41. 46. Joseph Bristow, “Introduction,” in The Importance of Being Earnest and Related Writings, ed. Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992): 23.

chapter 6

The British New Wave begins: Richardson’s Look Back in Anger Steve Nicholson

ma tanner: What do you really want, Jimmy? Jimmy continues digging at the grave. He stops and looks at her. He shrugs. jimmy: Everything. (Pause – he looks away) Nothing. She looks at him. Whistle of distant train passing.

The stage version of John Osborne’s play that opened at London’s Royal Court Theatre in May 1956 both captured and helped invent the spirit of its time. According to its director, Tony Richardson, the phrase “angry young man” – which had been coined five years earlier for an autobiography by the founder of the Woodcraft Folk – was “a journalistic label we all detested.”1 But affixed to Jimmy Porter by an imaginative marketing manager at the Royal Court (who himself disliked Osborne’s play), the phrase entered mainstream public debate and was quickly applied not only to the playwright and the director, but to a host of emerging writers, and to dramatic characters stretching at least as far back as Hamlet and Faust. In 1958, Kenneth Allsop published a full-length analysis of The Angry Decade, including a chapter devoted primarily to denouncing Osborne’s plays and essays as “a sort of battle-cry from the espresso barricades” which, to his evident disgust, were now earning the playwright twice the annual income of the Prime Minister. He accused the playwright of looking back more in nostalgia than in anger, and yet somehow Osborne had gained “the ear of a generation,” and was now “increasingly inescapable” for anyone who read newspapers or magazines. Allsop’s analysis certainly had no sympathy for the play’s anti-hero: “When you detachedly list Jimmy Porter’s cardinal characteristics, sadism, self-righteousness, hysteria, sentimentality, viciousness, immaturity and coldness, they sound like a quick summary of the type of character who would have found instant employment in Belsen.”2 Allsop was accurate in noting the pervasiveness of the label attached to him. In 1957, Brenda Walker itemized a list of candidates and references in The 103

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Angry Young Men: Aspects of Contemporary Literature, and commentators lined up to declare that Jimmy Porter stood for “the culture of the ’fifties, typifying the malaise and frustration of a generation conceived out of decades of turmoil.”3 Although it was fairly evident that so far as form and structure were concerned, Osborne’s play was very far from revolutionary, it was widely taken to have changed certainly British theatre, and perhaps British society for ever, “simply because a contemporary play has explored a contemporary state of mind.”4 Nor was the impact limited to Britain: according to one reviewer, “It has shaken Great Britain and the Commonwealth. It has rocked New York. It has travelled like wild-fire through Europe, and it has gone as far into Asia as Turkey.” Indeed, he wrote, its widespread relevance was such that it could as well have been staged under the title Look Back in Ankara.5 What was less apparent to cultural analysts such as Allsop was why so many young people seemed suddenly to have become angry, while others (the “I’m-Not-Angry-Young Men” and the “Very Satisfied Young Man”) were willing to accept the claim of the British Prime Minister that most people had “never had it so good.”6 But even while its center might be hard to pin down (Time Magazine said of Osborne that he “never seems to know quite where to probe for the core of the boil”),7 others sensed that it related to the stubbornly unchanging class divides and attitudes which seemed to be hardwired into British society, and a growing disillusionment that the postwar determination to construct a fairer and more equitable society – an ambition made manifest in the 1945 landslide election of a broadly left-wing Labour government – had had so little impact. “You’re hurt because everything is changed. And Jimmy’s hurt because . . . everything is the same,” says Alison to her father. The early 1950s had reinstated a business-as-usual Conservative party to power, and the Festival of Britain and the 1953 Coronation supposedly heralded a new Golden age full of the pomp, ceremony, and sycophancy which Osborne despised, and in which royalty was “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay.”8 But by 1956, the British Empire was breaking messily into pieces, its diplomats and politicians caught telling lies as its soldiers invaded Suez, and the threat of another world war and even nuclear destruction hung overhead. Still, the dominant mood within society seemed to be inertia. “I want to make people feel,” declared Osborne in 1957, “to give them lessons in feeling.”9 Or as an early review of Osborne’s play put it, Jimmy Porter, “Like so many young men of our time . . . feels that he is living amongst the dead.”10 Little of this was spelled out within the text of Osborne’s play. Yet arguably, the objects of Jimmy Porter’s anger did not need naming because they had infiltrated the very environment and were under our noses.

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Mr. Osborne has not perhaps fully succeeded in explaining what makes this particular Jimmy Porter the way he is. For this, audiences a hundred years hence may blame him. But the thinking audiences that the defiant English Stage Company wants to attract to the Royal Court need no such explanation.11

The first reviews of the stage production had been at best ambivalent, until a wave of interest developed following the celebration of the play’s originality of language and content by the major Sunday newspaper reviewers, Harold Hobson in the Sunday Times and especially Kenneth Tynan in the Observer, who famously declared that he couldn’t love anyone who didn’t want to see Osborne’s play.12 Yet audiences only really grew after an extract was broadcast on television, and even then the play’s natural London home was the state-subsidized Royal Court Theatre rather than the private sector. “No West End theatre would accept us, and no commercial management would take us on even as partners.”13 In America, where the play was staged in 1957, success was only assured when the play’s producer, “master promotor” David Merrick, bribed someone, supposedly outraged by Jimmy Porter’s attitudes to women, to climb on stage during a performance and physically assault the actor.14 According to Tynan, the anger – and the appeal of the play – were above all generational: Look Back in Anger is likely to remain a minority taste. What matters, however, is the size of the minority. I estimate it at roughly 6,733,000, which is the number of people in this country between the ages of twenty and thirty.15

And as Richardson explained, the Tynan and Hobson reviews were crucial: “they made us the theatre of the moment, the place where it was happening.”16 Like the stage production, the film was directed by Tony Richardson, who emphasized the similarities of the two versions rather than the differences: “Once material and characters have been poured into that mould, it’s very difficult to free them for recreation in another medium.” Later, Richardson wrote that he had always wanted to make the story as a film, and insisted that, in spite of some fairly substantial changes, “the core of it remained as it should have done – a filmed play.”17 With Osborne himself and the Canadian-born producer and impresario Harry Saltzman (who would later produce the early James Bond films), Richardson had co-founded Woodfall Films – the name of the company taken from the street in Chelsea where the playwright was living with his wife, Mary Ure, who appeared as Jimmy’s wife, Alison, on both stage and screen. It was Richardson’s first feature-length film, though he had

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previously co-directed Momma Don’t Allow, a quasi-documentary fly-on-thewall observation centered on Wood Green jazz club, some of whose musicians also appeared in the club scenes of Look Back. That first film had been made under the banner of the “Free Cinema” movement, which aimed to focus attention on “the poetry of everyday life,”18 and the film version of Osborne’s play is informed by some of the same commitment. Where the stage version is set entirely in one flat, the camera explores the streets and urban context, often lingering on images that build up a picture of everyday life beyond the strict requirements of the narrative. Woodfall Films generally, and Look Back specifically, also set out consciously to challenge conventions and attitudes within a British film industry which Richardson described as “smug, very closed and very opposed to new directors.” He was adamant “that any production by an established British studio would emasculate the play”19 and declared that it was “absolutely vital to get into British films the same sort of impact and sense of life that, what you can loosely call the Angry Young Man cult, has had in the theatre and literary worlds.”20 Cinema, said Richardson, was hidebound and in thrall to tradition, displaying “a mollusc-like tenacity” that favored “clinging to the easiest and most conventional ways of doing things.” This conservatism encompassed not only “resistance to new ideas, new subjects, new attitudes,” but “every phase of production,” from casting to set design, and from use of location to the role of the camera and how a scene was shot. “There is constantly a premium on ‘This is the way it was done last time,’ rather than on ‘This is the way it has never been done.’”21 By contrast, Richardson sought every opportunity to escape the confines of a studio – where things are more controlled, scripted, and predictable – embracing the unexpected and the disruptive. He cited the influence on his approach of the Italian neo-realists, explaining that he preferred location shooting “because many more surprises can happen than when you are working in the studio.”22 Locations employed in Look Back included Derby, to embody the reality of a dreary Midlands town “so bleak that it seems to smell of soft coal and leftover herring,”23 and various landscapes on the fringes of London – Stratford East, Deptford Market, Kensal Green, Romford, and (for the climactic railwaystation scenes), Dalston Junction. Another technique employed to give greater energy and edge – familiar enough today but innovative and unorthodox at the time – was to ask actors to improvise during the filming. This may also help to explain why a careful comparison of the play and film texts reveals that even when a line or speech is essentially the same, individual words may have been altered or removed, or the word-order shifted. Discussing the filming process, Richardson gave specific examples of how chance encounters had been built into the texture of the film, licensing

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metaphors and images which would have seemed overly contrived if he had planned them: On Look Back we were doing a shot with some Salvation Army people. Two of the girls – there were three of them in the shot – turned up in rimless glasses. Now, if the costume designer had dressed them like that somehow it would have seemed a caricature, and yet, in fact, it was wonderfully authentic and poignant. Just as we were about to shoot, a little boy walked up and stood gazing at them. He was dressed in a soldier’s coat and an American tin helmet, and held a long red, white and blue rifle . . . that is something you could never conceive of putting in the studio; and if you did, it would probably be rather arty and unreal.24

Not that Richardson was necessarily against layering in the sort of poetic touch and stylization that take the film beyond the naturalistic. Thus, recurring images – both sound and visual – are woven into the fabric of the film, echoing, alluding, or predicting. Children are noticed on a number of occasions, perhaps preparing us for Alison’s pain when she confides that she has lost not only the child she was carrying, but also the possibility of others in the future. Again, the sounds and images of trains passing – notably at Ma Tanner’s funeral – help to set up the climactic, expressionistically lit scenes at the railway station, which Richardson acknowledged were themselves conceived as “a homage to Brief Encounter,” and to a pre-war French film, Quai des brumes.25 And the newspapers we glimpse over the shoulders of Jimmy or Cliff include allusive headlines – “Sentenced to the Treadmill” and “Picking a Winner,” as well as references to the aristocracy. Such layers are introduced quite subtly and without calling undue attention to themselves. At first viewing we are unlikely to register that as Cliff invites Jimmy to make a comparison between Alison and Helena, the screen is shared by a close-up of Jimmy and the weighing machine he uses for measuring out sweets. The filming is also notable for what one reviewer termed an “extreme use of close-ups,” which occasionally verge on the melodramatic (as when Jimmy explains that he learned his anger as a result of witnessing his father die from wounds sustained fighting Fascism in Spain).26 Mirror shots are frequently employed, so that we witness what is happening wholly or partly through reflections, rather than directly. At different times, we observe the two women watching Jimmy in a mirror, and in more than one sequence Alison and Jimmy communicate with each other’s reflections rather than engaging face to face. Scenes are often overlapped through prolonged dissolves (so Alison’s ironing continues as we fade up elsewhere), though at times Richardson makes use of sudden cuts. An example of this latter

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technique is the “Hitchcockian sound edit” that crashes us from Jimmy’s shouted “Hell, hell, hell” response when Ma Tanner dies into the excited but unsettling screams of children playing in the street around the car which signals that Alison’s father has come to take her away.27 Some reviews were also quick to appreciate the innovative filming of interior scenes, including the precise echoing of early sequences between Jimmy and Alison in later ones with Helena: The scenes in the flat are mostly shot with a camera which moves incessantly and ingeniously – turning, tracking in and out, panning from side to side, often within a single shot . . . a risky device . . . However nervous, exploratory, wandering, the camera movement is never obtrusive. We are not so much aware of a physical movement as of a sensation of turmoil and disturbance perfectly keyed to the action within the pictures.28

Three years had passed between the opening of the play and the release of the film, and arguably the tone and the attack already belonged to the past. As one review put it, “The Jimmies of 1959” were “different from the Jimmies of 1956.”29 One of the more critical but reasoned responses to the film came from Isabel Quigly, a novelist and translator, who argued that there was little or nothing that an audience could still learn from the anger and anti-establishment aggression on display. “Ages ago (before Jimmy Porter’s arrival) there seemed to be plenty of smashable glass about, and plenty of adult reaction if you smashed it.” By contrast, the premiere of the film was even attended by Princess Margaret. The essential problem lay not in the adaptation or the aesthetics, but in the shifts of time: The film, thank heaven, does little diluting and less explaining . . . What makes it seem diluted is the fact that Jimmy Porter himself no longer turns up as a surprise. At the tail end of the fashion he once set, he now comes with a manner, a voice, opinions and grudges we know all too well; already we know the reactions he sets up, the sacred cows he (only too effectively) demolishes; indeed, the angry young man, cosseted till his anger looks like petulance, has become a stock figure of our society, with its cult of the misfit.

By 1959, argues Quigly, audiences were not so much appalled by the anger, as lapping it up, and the balance had altered. Apathy? No longer. To give one example, CND had now been invented and taken to the streets to challenge the political establishment and the lack of concern that had seemed ready to allow the country to drift uncomplainingly to its own annihilation. As Quigly pointedly observed, “the Porters have marched to Aldermaston and back.”30

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If British society was beginning to stir and to turn away from the past, this had implications for the screen version of Osborne’s play: “The film of Look Back in Anger had to reflect something of this change, to shift its emphases, or to die before it ever emerged.”31 Effectively, it had to enter into a dialogue with the original text. Jimmy’s declaration that “There aren’t any good, brave causes left” had become one of the most quoted lines from the play – often taken to signify the very root of both his and the playwright’s anger and frustration. Osborne himself had become irritated by the weight given to the statement, insisting that it did not necessarily represent a carefully considered position, or one which he endorsed. Indeed, it is spoken in the middle of a typically rhetorical flow, when, as a stage direction tells us, Jimmy is in a “semi-serious mood.” It is surely not by chance, then, that the line is cut from the film. More than this, it is a claim that the film refutes, showing us that there are indeed causes left which need fighting. It does this by inventing a new story line – not even hinted at in the play – in which a neighboring stall in the market where Jimmy and Cliff make their living is run by Kapoor, an Indian immigrant who is eventually defeated by the insularity and prejudice he encounters, and who has his license to trade unfairly revoked. Here, then, is a cause for Jimmy to take up – and the film shows him attempting to do so. On the first occasion when Hurst, the selfsatisfied jobsworth who polices the market, endeavors to withdraw Kapoor’s license, Jimmy and Cliff intervene to save him. It is their insistent questioning which exposes the fact that the woman confidently accusing Kapoor of having sold her sub-quality stockings is in the wrong, since Kapoor was not in the market on the day she bought them. Reluctantly (and unapologetically), she backs down (saying “Well if it wasn’t him it was one of his friends. They’re all the same”), and the inspector loses face as he returns the license. But Hurst gets his revenge, coincidentally while Jimmy is not there to help, because he is in the cinema with Helena, watching a film which depicts heroically the brutal repression by the British military of an uprising in nineteenth-century colonial India. By the time Jimmy returns to his stall, Kapoor has been “chucked out of the market” and is in the final stages of clearing his stock. “We’ve got to fight them,” Jimmy declares passionately, ostensibly to Kapoor, but actually in full close-up to us; “Hurst, the town clerk, the Mayor himself, the whole fascist gang.” Jimmy himself confronts Hurst, only to learn that it is his fellow stallholders who have ganged up against the outsider to get him into trouble. This immediately makes Jimmy’s position harder; while the previous example of prejudice – and the attempt to discredit Kapoor – began with someone who was the very image of the prim middle-class Jimmy so

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despises (and a woman to boot); this time it is the (male) fellow workers with whom Jimmy seeks to ally himself who are to blame. Jimmy approaches them in the bar to ask for an explanation and discovers that their motivation is – at least ostensibly – economic. “Seen his prices son. We’ve got to eat,” says one; “You’re lucky. He might have sold sweets,” adds another. Jimmy has no answer and walks away, leaving the stallholders to thank Hurst for his support by buying him an unusually posh drink. Kapoor, having no expectation of justice, prefers to run away to another town rather than to fight in a hopeless cause, and the film does nothing to suggest that Jimmy has any way to take up the political argument. We might even be inclined to think that the degree of rejection and disadvantage experienced by Kapoor – he explains to Jimmy that he has left his own country because he was “an outcast . . . an untouchable” – contrasts with the relative freedom and options still open to Jimmy in Britain at the end of the fifties. The credits of Look Back in Anger described the film as “Based on the play by John Osborne,” and even though Osborne himself contributed some new material – notably the scenes for Ma Tanner/Edith Evans – the screenplay was primarily the work of Nigel Kneale, a successful television writer who had already collaborated with Richardson on an adaptation of Chekhov, and was best known for an early and innovative television science-fiction drama, Quatermass. Kneale had not much liked the original playscript of Look Back in Anger, describing it as “the petulant irritation of a writer with a bad case of ‘block’ or a pile of rejected manuscripts.” Indeed, Kneale’s draft screenplay tended toward identifying Osborne more directly with his central character, introducing the idea that Jimmy himself had “literary leanings.”32 This suggestion was removed at Osborne’s insistence, though a couple of traces remain, as when Jimmy responds to Helena’s urging that he should be doing something more than running a sweet stall in the market by suggesting he could become “a literary gent.” At another point in the film, Helena defends the old-fashioned play she is acting in (and which Jimmy has just scoffed at) by telling him that it ran in the West End for a year: “Could you do that?” she asks him, sarcastically, in a line that makes little sense in relation to Jimmy but could possibly have been asked of Osborne himself. Kneale later claimed that the original decision to involve him in the project – apparently at Tynan’s suggestion – “caused Osborne some distress,” and that the playwright was disappointed not to be allowed to contribute more to the film script himself.33 On the other hand, Richardson suggests that Osborne was disinclined to amend his own work; before the play had been

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first produced, Richardson and George Devine – the director of the Royal Court Theatre, who, incidentally, appears in the film as the doctor to whom Alison goes – had “tried to get him [Osborne] to improve the play with rewrites,” but found him unwilling to do so.34 For his part, Osborne claimed he was relieved to have someone else take on responsibility for the screenplay, since he disliked “the necessity of becoming an inferior among equals, which is the unacknowledged status of a film-writer.” Moreover, he would have received no payment for doing it (as Richardson reportedly received none for directing it). However, Osborne does admit that he would have liked to have been consulted a little more about the process of adapting his script. “It seemed to me they were ripping out its obsessive, personal heart,” he wrote later of Richardson and Kneale; “I protested without much authority.”35 As we have seen, the film version is a response not only to the play itself, but also to the debate and the questions it had raised, with some reviewers claiming that the film “mends weaknesses in the play.”36 Suggestions had previously been made (to Osborne’s annoyance) that the unspoken secret at the heart of the play was that the relationship between Jimmy and Cliff was actually (or latently) homosexual. The film goes some distance in trying to demonstrate Cliff’s heterosexuality (his walls are covered with pictures of young women, and in the first few minutes of the film we see him with a young woman, and later hear that he has gone home with her). Yet in truth, the jealousy expressed by Cliff when he is shut out from a moment of intimacy between Helena and Jimmy means that the possibility of a suppressed and unrealized sexual dimension to the male relationship is not entirely dispelled. We might notice, for instance, that Cliff’s plan to spend the night with his girlfriend comes to nothing, while Jimmy still declares to him as they part that, “You’re worth half a dozen Helenas to me” (Illustration 6.1). Indeed, the replacement at the end of this line of the original “or to anyone,” by “you know that?” has the effect of making it a much more personal statement. The film not only opens out the action of the play by taking us repeatedly into the world outside the flat, but it also opens up Jimmy himself, establishing sides to him which are not visible in the play. On the whole, the effect is to make him more acceptable – or at least, to indicate that he has positive attributes rather than just a gift of criticizing others. The opening sequences show him thriving in his element as a highly talented musician (something not present in the play), delighting audiences in the jazz club, and being admired by the musicians in the band to which he briefly lends himself. As Stuart Hall realized, this risks changing the very equation on which the play had been based:

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6.1 Jimmy’s most affectionate relationship is with Cliff Lewis (Gary Raymond), who shares his disappointment with the adult world and the British “establishment.”

It is altogether wrong for Jimmy to be the skilful, central performer at the local club, commanding the undivided attention and adoring watchful gaze of Cliff and others: it is far too stereotyped an opening, touching the fringes of bad Hollywood musical films, and it sets Jimmy up rather than apart.37

Sure enough, we then see Jimmy in excellent humor as he leaves the club, still playing occasional notes and trying out dance routines as he walks home late at night, transcending his immediate surroundings of colorless and rainy suburban streets. He even receives an unexplained answering trumpet call from the soundtrack – it might be in appreciation from God – and then resists the temptation (as the 1956 Jimmy would surely not have done) to play a loud blast underneath a window where presumably Alison is sleeping. When he goes inside, he is duly drawn to the figure of his sleeping wife, and although the mood is partially broken when he finds a letter she has been writing (probably to her parents), he gets into the bed. She stirs and welcomes him, and the final image of the sequence suggests two young people about to embark on passionate lovemaking. The cut which follows jolts us from the pleasures of Saturday night into the dull grayness and tedious arguments of a dreary Sunday morning in the flat. The morning after. A hangover. Later – on Monday, perhaps – we see Jimmy’s relaxed relationship with other stallholders – not only Kapoor – and with the children and adults who frequent the market. He seems at ease with himself and the world, at home and well liked. But the clearest signification of Jimmy’s essential human decency is demonstrated in the mutual relationship of respect – love, even – which he enjoys with the elderly Ma Tanner. In the play she remained an unseen character, mentioned only briefly, but here she is given a couple of powerful scenes, which Osborne himself

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apparently wrote. So when Jimmy picks up Alison for her awkwardness in greeting Ma Tanner – an awkwardness Alison herself acknowledges (“alison: I just couldn’t bear to be touched / jimmy: You made that perfectly plain”) we surely side with his instinctive warmth and against Alison’s middle-class awkwardness. Critics of the play have pointed to the supposedly naïve happy ending as a weakness, with its embarrassing talk of bears and squirrels. While these passages may indeed seem clumsy and make us feel uncomfortable, this is a slightly unfair reading, since Alison has already told us (and Helena) that it represents “the one way of escaping from everything” and is a language created “for people who couldn’t bear the pain of being human beings any longer.” Lapsing into it at the end of the play, then, is a retreat and not a triumph, and the final scenes of the film do nothing to convince us that the future for Jimmy and Alison will necessarily be any better than the past. It is true that, unlike in the play, Jimmy comes to the station to look for her, and even that his face seems to signal a desperate need for her. But there is no promise that this will survive until tomorrow; earlier in the same evening we have seen him propose to Helena that they should run away together to start a life elsewhere, and it is surely disturbing that in the prolonged final image of the film, the kiss which seems to be confidently promised as the camera moves ever closer to Jimmy and Alison is almost comically withheld, until finally their faces are swamped and subsumed in steam, trumpet, and darkness. The casting for the film involved some interesting choices. Much of the funding was secured through backing by Warner Brothers, with the total budget around $500,000 (higher than any subsequent Woodfall film for the next four years), and a quarter of this money going to Richard Burton for his portrayal of Jimmy. Mary Ure, married to Osborne since 1957, played Alison, and was the only member of the original Royal Court production to survive, though Gary Raymond played Cliff in both the 1957 stage revival and the film. Claire Bloom, who had been in the running to play Alison on Broadway, was chosen instead for Helena, though some reviewers suggested she and Ure should have been cast the other way round. Bloom was well enough known as both a stage and film actress (she had been sought out by Charlie Chaplin to appear in Limelight) to count as a minor star and appear in the credits above Ure. As for Ma Tanner, according to Osborne this “was a treacherously difficult role with almost no immunity against mawkishness, which was the reason I had banished her off-stage early on when writing the play.” But he subsequently acknowledged that “working on it with Edith Evans turned out to be one of the few pleasurable privileges film-making

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offered, and between us I think we more or less got away with it.”38 Certainly her presence did no harm in raising the film’s commercial and critical profile. But the key casting decision was the role of Jimmy Porter. Richardson and Osborne had both become disenchanted with Kenneth Haigh’s stage performance; they apparently found him under-performing and even cutting out speeches on Broadway “when he declared that he ‘wasn’t feeling it,’” to the obvious detriment of the play and his fellow performers.39 Dirk Bogarde was reportedly interested, but it was Richard Burton who was finally persuaded to take the part – not least, it seems, because he “owed” Warner Brothers a film.40 Burton would receive very mixed reviews for his performance, with some critics feeling that he was just too old to be an angry young man (he was thirty-three when the film was released) or just too Shakespearean in voice and manner (“Richard Burton turns Jimmy into a seething, snarling Elizabethan villain who seems on the point of forgetting himself and spewing out the speech of Shakespeare’s Edmund”).41 Saltzman would later call the choice of Burton “a monumental miscalculation” and accuse him of having “made nonsense of the text.”42 By contrast, Osborne described him as a “huge asset to our modest undertaking,” which “guaranteed dignity . . . if not commercial success.”43 But his presence encouraged reviewer after reviewer to characterize Jimmy Porter as a modern version of Hamlet, adrift in a society which only he can see is corrupt, but which he has no way of rectifying. (“O cursed spite / That ever Jimmy Porter was born to set it right!”, as one reviewer put it).44 Such identification was probably only encouraged by the fact that both Ure and Bloom had also appeared recently in the role of Ophelia. Look Back in Anger was licensed in Britain as an “X” – the certificate introduced earlier in the fifties to denote films suitable for people over sixteen. It was a certificate sometimes seen as a “potential kiss of death,” which “signaled a prurient entertainment to audiences and potential boxoffice disaster to exhibitors.” But this film, together with Room at the Top, released earlier in the same year, “proved that the ‘X’ curse could be broken” and that “a quality film containing material not deemed fit for ‘family viewing’ could still do well at the box office.”45 Whether Look Back could in fact be listed as a commercial success is probably doubtful; Saltzman would later claim he had “never made a film that got such good reviews and was seen by so few people.”46 In November 1959 it was chosen as the official British entry for a film festival in Acapulco, but both Richardson and Osborne treated the selection with snobbish contempt. According to Osborne, Saltzman had used bribery to try to get the film accepted for showing at the Cannes Film Festival but was beaten to it by Room at the Top.

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“As some sort of recompense, we were invited as the official British entry to a film festival in Acapulco, of all places . . . a banana-republic fiesta with no cultural pretensions.”47 Yet Look Back was also chosen by the American film industry as the best foreign film of the year. Advertisements for the film often drew on the play’s history as a “sensation-loaded stage smash.” Audiences were invited to witness “the raw drama that took on a whole conventional world and made it gasp,” while one poster claimed that theatre audiences had been “jolted as if they’d been sitting for 2 hours in an electric chair,” and promised “it’s twice as jolting on the screen!” Most of the images and slogans leaned heavily on the domestic angle. “Come on in . . . to the dangerous little place where two women and a man live in a kind of madness they call love,” urged one. Press reviews mostly focused on one or more of three recurring issues: the decision to “open out” the film with new characters and locations; the performance of Richard Burton as Jimmy Porter; and the effect of the cuts made to his monologues. The Manchester Guardian criticized the decision to add new scenes and characters which, while they might explain and justify the central character’s “nihilistic rage against an unjust and unreceptive world,” also lessened its power: “they tend to build up a picture of the Angry Young Man as a rather more conventionally decent chap than he might otherwise appear.” Moreover, removing the stuffy and claustrophobic intensity of the single-room setting diluted the intensity and excess of the monologues which had formed the basis of the play’s danger; it “should never have been filmed unless the director had the courage to keep his camera inside that dingy bed-sitting room.”48 In 1959, that would have required courage indeed. By contrast, the New York Times found that “the fury and hate” of Osborne’s “vicious play” were “not only matched but also documented” by the screen version. The opening out through “pictorial reinforcement” was effective, ensuring that “the passion of the characters now comes at you through the drab and depressing milieu of a genuine British midlands city and the sweatiness of an ugly slum” (Illustration 6.2). If Porter himself remains “a conventional weakling” and “a routine crybaby,” and Alison and Helena a pair of “strangely gullible creatures” (Illustration 6.3), then at least the dreary setting provided a vital context for Jimmy’s anger: “The long accumulation of middle-class smugness against which he fitfully rebels . . . is brilliantly illustrated by shots of people going to church in the rain and by glimpses of rows of ugly houses and streets in which grimy youngsters play.”49 For The Times, Edith Evans as a working-class cockney stretched credulity, even though “Dame Edith, in full cry, can make anyone believe in

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6.2 Cliff, Jimmy, and the latter’s two love interests, wife Alison (Mary Ure) and inamorata Helena (Claire Bloom), constitute an unstable and conflict-ridden ménage.

6.3 Jimmy (Richard Burton) and Helena (Claire Bloom) have an affair as filled with bitterness and anger as Jimmy’s marriage to Alison.

anything.” However, the scenes between Jimmy and Alison possessed “a positively Shakespearean rhythm and violence with Jimmy, a latter-day Hamlet, raving against the out-of-jointness of the times and the inadequacy of women, and Alison an Ophelia bullied and badgered beyond endurance.”50 The Observer, too, was compelled by Burton’s ability to deliver the power of Osborne’s language “with the full ring of a Shakespearean veteran,” and sound echoes of both Hamlet and Iago. However, such invocations clashed with the social reality of a film that “never really explains how Jimmy Porter came to use words of four syllables and declaim them like a polished actor.”51 For Alan Dent in the Illustrated London News, Burton was essentially – and only – an interpreter of Shakespeare: “an excellent Hamlet . . . Coriolanus and Iago, Othello and Henry V.” His mistake was

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to treat the text as if it were by Shakespeare: “when this magnificent young actor plays a crusted character like Jimmy Porter you see him all the time vainly trying to identify that character with Hamlet.” Sadly, says Dent, “The identification just cannot be brought about.” But it was the critics rather than Burton who were looking desperately for the references.52 According to David Robinson in Sight and Sound, the film was “a breakthrough” that compared favorably with the other take on class issues released in the same year, an adaptation of John Braine’s novel, Room at the Top. Here is a film which has something to say, and which says it without reference to conventional box-office values. It is a film in which a director has developed a personal style for the purposes of his theme. It is a film that can hold its own in the international field. It is a film with the power to excite you. And it is also a film which cost a quarter of a million pounds.

While it sometimes exhibited a “strained, intellectual style,” this was “no demerit in a cinema where for so long film-making has just been a business of illustrating scripts with moving pictures.”53 Gavin Lambert – the former editor of Sight and Sound – was similarly enthusiastic in Film Quarterly. For him, the film was a definite improvement on the play, and he constructed it as part of a bigger project to which it was vital to lend support – rather as Tynan had talked up the stage play in his wish to reinvent contemporary theatre. Lambert concludes that “Things seem to be happening in the British cinema” and cites “this brilliant film,” along with Room at the Top and the Free Cinema movement, as evidence that an outdated British film industry may finally be melting: “there are real signs of a crack in that formidable ice.” Adopting the dismissive tone and language which Jimmy mockingly aims at Alison, Lambert sneered that “The most damning thing one can say about most British films is that they’re made for Mummy,” and he was confident that “she won’t like Look Back in Anger.” For Lambert, this was what might later have been termed “in yer face cinema”: “F– you is Jimmy Porter’s very simple answer to Mummy.”54 One of the obvious “problems” for the reception of both play and film – probably even more apparent now than it was at the time – is that the central character, who embodies much of the energy and attack of the play, and who is so damning of the prevailing status quo, is also so deeply unpleasant and such a hard character to like. According to Time Magazine, “he looks back not so much in anger as in madness,” and rather than an audience, “he needs a doctor.”55 His loathing of society is channeled almost entirely into callous, vicious, and repeated attacks (primarily psychological and verbal but in one

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instance briefly physical) on his wife, as the embodiment of the British ruling class that he so despises. We can, perhaps, excuse – as part of the attitude of the times – the assumptions about his wife’s domestic duties; it could even be argued that the visibility of Alison (and later Helena) taking on the ironing and other chores exposes to critique something which might usually have remained hidden. But although some critics have argued that the conflict is not as one-sided as it may appear, and that Alison uses silence as an effective weapon, the contempt and constant abuse by Jimmy – often taken to indicate misogyny on Osborne’s part – remain disturbing. Writing in 1958, Kenneth Allsop linked Osborne with Strindberg and Lawrence, insisting that ultimately, “Jimmy Porter’s neurosis is a sexual one which wraps itself up in class clothing.”56 The Daily Mirror put it more bluntly: “there can be no sympathy for a young man who behaves with such insolent and stupid boorishness”; what Jimmy Porter deserved was “a swift punch on the jaw.”57 Perhaps the film of Look Back in Anger has not stood the test of time. That, at least, is the conclusion to be drawn from the analysis currently offered by the BFI. By contrast with other British “new wave” films of the period, which, they suggest, continue to show well, Richardson’s film is “grim viewing,” “dated,” “chauvinistic,” “reveling in misogynistic hatred,” and with “little of interest to say.” Stylistically unadventurous, it is “full of talk” and “endless diatribes” that are “deeply tiresome.” Particularly concerning is the fact “that we are supposed to like Jimmy and empathize with his actions.”58 But there are some assumptions here that might be questioned. Crucially, Osborne himself, writing retrospectively about the challenge of casting the central role for the original production, notes the difficulty of finding an “actor who could face the withdrawal of audience approval and, even, seem to incite it.” In other words, it was never his expectation or intention that we should “like Jimmy.”59 Moreover, Osborne rejected the assumption that Art was somehow intended to be improving or to offer hope. In 1960 he reviewed a collection of plays by Tennessee Williams, “the contemporary dramatist who has exercised perhaps the strongest influence on his own work,” and dismissed the idea that audiences should look to art for models of good or admirable individuals: Williams’s plays, he said, were “about failure,” and it is failure which “makes human beings interesting.” Those who attacked Williams on the grounds that his characters were “neurotics” or “not ‘normal’” were missing the essence of what his drama was about. For Osborne, the strength of Williams’s plays was that they were “a kick in the face,” and it was their “unsure attitudes and moral inconsistency” which he most respected. Look Back in Anger needs to be seen in relation to these comments. For as

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Osborne concluded in relation to Williams’s work, “To ignore these plays is to ignore the world we live in.”60 Notes 1. Leslie Paul, Angry Young Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1951). 2. Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the 1950s (London: Peter Owen, 1958): 96–132. 3. Brenda Walker, The Angry Young Men: Aspects of Contemporary Literature (London: Library Association, 1957); David Robinson, “Look Back in Anger,” Sight and Sound (Summer/Autumn 1959): 122–123 and 179. 4. Ibid. 5. “Oh, Mr Porter!,” Illustrated London News, June 13, 1959: 1030. 6. Allsop, The Angry Decade: 100. 7. Time, September 28, 1959. 8. John Osborne, “They Call it Cricket,” in Declaration, ed. Tom Maschler (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957): 61–84. 9. Ibid. 10. Robert Muller, “Angry Young Men,” Picture Post, June 23, 1956: 33–34. 11. Ibid. 12. Kenneth Tynan, Observer, May 13, 1956: 11. 13. Tony Richardson, Long Distance Runner: A Memoir (London: Faber and Faber, 1993): 79. 14. According to Frank Rich’s obituary of Merrick, New York Times, April 27, 2000, A1 and B4. See also Richardson, Long Distance Runner: 93. 15. Tynan, Observer, May 13, 1956: 11. 16. Richardson, Long Distance Runner: 79. 17. Ibid., 97. 18. James M. Welsh, “Introduction: Running the Distance,” in The Cinema of Tony Richardson: Essays and Interviews, ed. James M. Welsh and John C. Tibbetts (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999): 6. 19. Richardson, Long Distance Runner: 97. 20. Tony Richardson, “The Man Behind an Angry-Young Man,” Films and Filming (February 1959): 9 and 32. 21. Richardson, [untitled], Sight and Sound (Spring 1959): 64. 22. Richardson, “The Man Behind an Angry-Young Man.” 23. Time Magazine, September 28, 1959, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,811315-1,00.html. 24. Richardson, “The Man Behind an Angry-Young Man.” 25. Richardson, Long Distance Runner: 97. 26. Review of Look Back in Anger, Sight and Sound (Summer/Autumn 1959). 27. John C. Tibbetts, “Breaking the Proscenium: Tony Richardson, the Free Cinema, the Royal Court, and Woodfall Films,” in The Cinema of Tony Richardson, ed. Welsh and Tibbetts: 67. 28. Robinson, “Look Back in Anger,” Sight and Sound (Summer/Autumn 1959).

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29. Ibid. 30. Isabel Quigly, “Shouting at the Converted,” Spectator, June 5, 1959, 5. 31. Robinson, “Look Back in Anger,” Sight and Sound (Summer/Autumn 1959). 32. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Michael Joseph, 1974): 59. 33. Ibid. 34. Richardson, Long Distance Runner: 75. 35. John Osborne, Almost a Gentleman: An Autobiography, vol. ii: 1955–1966 (London: Faber and Faber, 1991): 107–108. 36. William Whitebait in New Statesman, May 30, 1959: 758. 37. Stuart Hall, “Jimmy Porter and the Two-And-Nines,” Definition: Quarterly Journal of Film Criticism, 1 (February 1960): 9–14. 38. Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, vol. ii: 108. 39. Ibid., 57. 40. Tibbetts, in The Cinema of Tony Richardson, ed. Welsh and Tibbetts: 70. 41. Time Magazine, September 28, 1959, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/ 0,9171,811315-1,00.html. 42. Walker, Hollywood England: 58. 43. Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, vol. ii: 107. 44. “Oh, Mr. Porter!” 45. Tibbetts, in The Cinema of Tony Richardson, ed. Welsh and Tibbetts: 69. 46. Walker, Hollywood England: 58. 47. Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, vol. ii: 139. 48. Manchester Guardian, May 27, 1959: 9, and June 18, 1959: 11. 49. Bosley Crowther, “Briton’s Protest,” New York Times, September 16, 1959: 45. 50. The Times, May 27, 1959: 7. 51. C. A. Lejeune, “Molto Furioso,” Observer, May 31, 1959: 23. 52. “Oh, Mr Porter!” 53. Robinson, “Look Back in Anger,” Sight and Sound (Summer/Autumn 1959). 54. Gavin Lambert, Film Quarterly, 12.4 (Summer 1959): 39–41. 55. Time Magazine. 56. Allsop, The Angry Decade: 110. 57. Daily Mirror, May 29, 1959: 19. 58. www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/440703/index.html. 59. Osborne, Almost a Gentleman, vol. ii: 17. 60. John Osborne, “Sex and Failure,” in Protest, ed. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (London: Souvenir Press, 1959): 316–319.

chapter 7

The shift from stage to screen: space, performance, and language in The Knack . . . and How to Get It Christine Geraghty

Looking back on the “explosion of world cinema” in the 1960s, Peter Cowie noted that The Knack . . . and How to Get It was Richard Lester’s “most spectacular success” and remarks that the director had so saturated the film “with his ebullient personality” that “it now seems unbelievable that the film derived from a stage play.”1 Cowie is not alone in paying little attention to the film’s origins. Unlike a number of the films of the British New Wave that played on their status as film adaptations of groundbreaking and scandalous books and plays,2 publicity for The Knack . . . and How to Get It tended to reject its theatrical connections, and it is unlikely that cinema audiences in 1965 would have been making comparisons between the two. Historians of British cinema have also played down the film’s status as an adaptation and, insofar as the film has had critical attention, it tends to be discussed as one of the defining films of the brief period of the swinging sixties. Nevertheless, there is merit in considering whether and how the theatrical origins of the film shaped some of its aesthetics. I have chosen to view The Knack . . . as an adaptation partly because it offers the opportunity to look at some methods of adaptation which have been specifically associated with the move from a theatrical production to the screen. In addition, the film offers an example of the critical difficulty of dealing with changes in sensibility and attitudes that can make a cultural work almost unreadable at a later date. In approaching the question of how rape is handled in the film, I ask whether looking at The Knack . . . and How to Get It as an adaptation makes it more available for contemporary viewing. This chapter begins with a study of the context of the play, taking into account how it was critically understood at the time and how it has been positioned in later accounts of British theatre. In doing so, I take the opportunity to compare its treatment with that of a contemporary play by 121

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Shelagh Delaney, A Taste of Honey. The comparison between Jellicoe and Delaney was made at the time and has continued in accounts of the period written as the plays moved into theatre history. This comparison is also useful for considering the film adaptation; A Taste of Honey was also made into a film, but its rather different critical history points up some of the processes of adaptation which, in this case, meant that the two adaptations went in rather different directions.

The theatrical context The Knack . . . and How to Get It was based on the play The Knack, which was first staged in 1961. Its author, Ann Jellicoe, was heavily engaged with some of the key institutions of the mid-fifties revolution in British theatre that is deemed to have begun with John Osborne’s opening salvo: Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court Theatre in 1956. Jellicoe had studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked extensively in repertory and fringe theatre. She was the first woman to have a play produced on the main bill by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, the first woman to direct a play there, and the first woman literary manager of the English Stage Company. Despite differences in age and experience, Jellicoe and Delaney had a number of things in common. Both had their first plays staged in 1958; both were connected to the two major experimental theatres of the time, the Royal Court in West London and the Theatre Workshop in London’s Stratford East; both had one play which went on to commercial and critical success, transferring to the West End and to successful runs in the US; and they were the only women playwrights of the otherwise male-dominated theatrical New Wave. The Knack was Jellicoe’s second play, an English Stage Company production, which was first staged at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge in October 1961 and arrived at the Court in March 1962, after a regional tour. Jellicoe, like Delaney, was felt to have a particular appeal to youth: “you’ve got to be young to get with this play,” wrote Michael Kustow, dropping into the idiom when reviewing it for Encore, “to get the exuberance of Ann Jellicoe’s writing and stage-sense, with Rita Tushingham, joyful, jumping and expectant as Nancy.”3 Jellicoe’s identification with the New Wave was based on this appeal to youth as well as on her institutional connections and her commitment to experimentation; the New Wave’s emphasis on naturalism, working-class mores, and the detail of everyday experience, praised by contemporary reviewers as strong features of A Taste of Honey, were less prominent in her work. She did challenge social norms and power

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relationships but did so through playfulness and style. The influential John Russell Taylor signaled her difference when he hailed The Knack as “a complete departure in subject-matter” and saw it as a “direct illustration” of Jellicoe’s belief that “people are driven by their emotions, and by their fears and insecurities.” Even though the dialogue is “a series of disjointed non sequiturs or uncomprehending repetitions,” he argues that “the spectator is carried along irresistibly by the verve and ebullience of this play.”4

The reputation of The Knack This emphasis on Jellicoe’s use of language and form that challenges the audience was carried into later assessments of how her work can be positioned into a history of British theatre. In 1977, Jellicoe was included in a collection entitled Twenty Modern British Playwrights, but the author noted that her plays are theatrical events. There are few memorable lines, little philosophical insight or social analysis. Early critics felt that Jellicoe played too directly to theatre professionals, that ordinary audiences could not appreciate her consuming interest in stage “effect.”5

This unease pervades a later assessment, made in 1992, which commented that Jellicoe relies on rituals which have “no clear rhyme or reason about them” and uses the theatre “to involve her audience in experiences they might not understand, and which are certainly not explained, but simply thrown in the audience’s face.”6 Later assessments have been more sympathetic. The leading director Richard Eyre took a different view of this emphasis on ritual action and described the “brilliantly original” The Knack as “the polar opposite of Osborne’s rhetoric” and as “a play where words took a minor place to action and image.”7 Susan Bennett goes further to argue that “it is possible to see Jellicoe – far more than Osborne – as rewriting the terms and conditions of British theatre practice through her attempts to match form to the social and psychic lives of her characters.”8 Eyre and Bennett thus seek to move Jellicoe from her position as a somewhat maverick member of the New Wave into a more central and significant position. Bennett allied Jellicoe with Delaney in arguing that both women writers “push the boundaries of social-realism far further than Osborne’s Look Back in Anger.”9 As feminist writing on British theatre emerged in the 1980s, these two writers had been linked in another way. An early example of this was Helene Keyssar’s 1984 account of Delaney and Jellicoe in a chapter significantly entitled “Foothills: Precursors of Feminist Drama.”10 In 1993,

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Lizbeth Goodman argued that, after the Second World War, women were encouraged “to stay at home again” and commented that “It is not surprising that the plays of the period tended to reflect a certain sense of rebellion against enforced domesticity; these were the plays of Shelagh Delaney, Anne Jellicoe and Doris Lessing.”11 In the same year, Lib Taylor described the 1950s as a “regressive” period for women dramatists but saw 1958 as a “crossroads” with productions by Delaney and Jellicoe as a significant feature.12 While A Taste of Honey, as “a pre-feminist classic,”13 tends to feature most strongly in this line of criticism, Jellicoe is also co-opted into this history as a female but pre-feminist playwright. This positioning as pre-feminist is not just a question of dates, of the plays being written before the emergence of second-wave feminism. A Taste of Honey and The Knack offered what were felt to be some difficulties to feminist interpretation in terms of their approach to particular aspects of women’s experience – motherhood in A Taste of Honey and rape in The Knack. A Taste of Honey is welcomed for its unusual focus on the relationship between mother and daughter, and it is recognized that Jo “as a young female protagonist had the significance of a breakthrough.”14 But it is also felt that, although Jo and her mother Helen do not conform to the imposed norms of motherhood, gender stereotyping is not clearly resisted, and neither woman is given “alternative aspirations.”15 The Knack, in which Nancy challenges Tolen’s power by falsely alleging rape, poses even more of a problem. Keysser argues that the difficulty of seeing the play as a predecessor to feminist theatre “lies directly in its plot,” which hinges on this allegation; and although she offers a nuanced account that reflects on the play’s impact on the audience in performance, Keysser nevertheless concludes that the play “deters us from taking rape seriously; it, indeed, allows us to think of rape as a joke.”16 Taylor concurs that the accusation “functions to reveal the processes of manipulation and power but the issue of rape is in no way addressed.”17 Thus, if Jellicoe as a woman was initially positioned to one side of the main current in New Wave histories, here, as a precursor of feminist drama, she is criticized for failing to find the correct analysis of rape and offering “a vision [which] is finally ahistorical and apolitical.”18 One final point about the connections between Jellicoe and Delaney is worth making. Neither of them had the ongoing career as a playwright achieved by their male contemporaries such as John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, and Harold Pinter. These writers had their failures and successes and have moved in and out of fashion, but all maintained a career within the established theatre. Delaney, by contrast, after the failure of her second play

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A Lion in Love in 1960, did not write for the theatre again for many years, though she wrote for film, television, and radio. Jellicoe, in the 1970s, took her skills into community theatre, building her reputation around this more experimental route. New Wave success did not result in a conventional career for either of them. Whether this was because of their position as women is beyond the scope of this chapter.

The transfer of authorship In accounts of British theatre, then, Jellicoe’s The Knack is related to A Taste of Honey, and both plays are positioned in two different ways – as contributions to the British theatre’s New Wave and as rather problematic precursors of the later development of feminist theatre. However, as films, the two go in different directions and relate rather differently to their theatrical source as well as to British cinema. While the analysis of screen adaptations of plays inevitably involves emphasizing the differences between film and theatre, it is worth noting the cross-connections between the two at this point. In the 1950s and 1960s, British cinema and theatre shared a production context in which personnel moved across from plays to films and back again. They both benefited from the changes in the funding of actors’ training which supported those from less well-off backgrounds and created a pool of young actors with claims to regional and working-class credentials. Actors moved between cinema and stage, even though they did not necessarily follow their parts in the transition.19 In both theatre and cinema, by the late 1950s, a desire to push at the boundaries was evident. As Tony Richardson put it, British cinema and theatre were “part of the same movement. The same writers want to make films . . . the way it is going there is quite a lot of cross-fertilization.”20 The interaction between theatre and cinema was thus unusually prominent in this period. Nevertheless, the adaptations of both A Taste of Honey and The Knack are marked by one of the most prominent signs of an adaptation: the shift of ownership, in which the text ceases to be the property of the original author and is taken over by another. This “second author” features in publicity and becomes the one who is seen to have authority and influence over the source’s meaning. In cinema, this is normally the director (though in television it may be the writer). There are situations in which the first author still continues to have a hold either for publicity purposes or through legal agreements; Jane Austen (and her estate) and J. K. Rowling are examples of authors who have a continuing impact on their adapted work. But the more common route is

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for the original authors to be displaced, sometimes getting a reference in the first critical reception, but with little further influence on how the adaptation will be positioned or understood as a film. In many ways, the reputation of the film of A Taste of Honey benefited from the shift in authorship from Delaney to the director Tony Richardson. Richardson, as a theatre and film director and a co-founder of the English Stage Company and Woodfall Films, played a pivotal role in the British New Wave as it enveloped both theatre and cinema in the late 1950s. He had a clear credo for film, which he believed to be “a totally realistic medium,” and was determined to take film out of the studio into the real world.21 The film of A Taste of Honey, with its location shooting on Blackpool pier, down on the canal, and out on the moors, demonstrated the energy and commitment of this kind of filmmaking (Illustration 7.1). This was important because it meant that the film was in accord with cinema’s New Wave, which, since Room at the Top, had consistently relied on realist adaptations. Subsequently, as the study of British cinema began to coalesce around key figures and genres, the film was fitted into the dominant tradition of realism that persisted even when a critique of the New Wave was mounted in the 1980s. A Taste of Honey was, indeed, one of the films attacked by John Hill and others for showing a particularly distanced, upper-middle-class view of working-class life. But the residual authorship of Delaney, referenced by the central role of Jo, meant that it could later be noted as a rare instance of a New Wave film that offered “a feminine sensibility and a style and story that still seem fresh and moving forty years on” (Illustration 7.2), though significantly it was praised for creating “a cinematic, rather than a theatrical experience.”22

7.1 Taste evokes the grimness of working-class Liverpool by Walter Lassally’s expert on-location photography.

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7.2 The advertising campaign for Taste expresses the youthful vigor and optimism so central to British New Wave production.

None of this applied to Richard Lester’s version of The Knack, which was released just four years later in 1965. Like A Taste of Honey, the film followed quickly on the play but not quickly enough to be seen as a film of British cinema’s New Wave which is normally deemed to have finished with Billy Liar in 1963. Moreover, that movement was now being seen as a disappointment partly because it had relied too heavily on adaptations. In 1962, an editorial in Sight and Sound reflected that the promise of a breakthrough had not been effected and identified the reliance on adaptations as a major problem: Almost everything that is good or serious or adventurous in our cinema originates in a novel or a place: and although there is nothing wrong with adaptations as such . . . there is something wrong with an industry which thinks so consistently in terms of adaptation.23

In terms of The Knack, the transfer of authorship from Jellicoe to Lester involved not only a shift in medium and in gender but also a generational shift, not so much in terms of ages (Lester was only five years younger than Jellicoe), but in terms of a movement away from the ideas that had driven change in British theatre and cinema since 1956. As we have seen, The Knack had established Jellicoe as a writer whose work spoke to young audiences, but Lester had skipped on a generation, his reputation established by the success of his first Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. Although he was regularly associated with the modish tricks of the French New Wave, Lester, unlike Jellicoe, was not seen as a participant in the British movement. The emphasis on youthful irreverence and freshness in his filmmaking positioned him as a director of the swinging sixties, with a cool eye for the

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developing modes of consumption and advertising.24 His youthful characters were not angry but exuberant, lively, and confident of taking over. Jellicoe seems to have made few comments about Lester’s film of her play, though in an interview, nearly forty years after its release, she said that she had disliked handing over the play to the scriptwriter Charles Wood: “I do remember I had nothing to do with it, and being so irritated when they mistimed the jokes.”25 In interviews about the making of the film, Lester said that he had read but not seen the play because seeing it meant “you retain too strong an image that bleeds over into your own work,” though he acknowledged that Wood was “quite faithful to some of her [Jellicoe’s] rhythms” and tried to retain the feeling of “carefully mannered dialogue which worked on the stage.”26 But Lester emphasizes that he had made major changes, pushing, for instance, Tolen’s “eventual crumbling far heavier than I think Ann Jellicoe would have liked it”27 and describing how he and Wood had taken the play apart in order to make the screenplay: “I respect the material enough to try and change it totally for the screen . . . You explode it totally first.”28 Not surprisingly perhaps, Movie began its review by suggesting that “Dick Lester smashes Ann Jellicoe’s play to fragments.”29 On the film’s release, some early reviews did compare the play to the film with mixed degrees of enthusiasm. One review indeed suggested that the film provides an example of “the danger of messing around with somebody else’s work” and praised the cast by suggesting that they would work even more effectively back in the theatre: the actors are “so perfectly cast that one would love to see them in an integral version of the play.”30 In the US, film critic Andrew Sarris sourly commented that the film’s attack on “DonJuanism” could be put down to the film’s origins in Jellicoe’s play and pointed out that “Miss Jellicoe is obviously a woman”31 – a pre-feminist response to a pre-feminist author. Reviewers whose initial response was to make the comparison with the play nevertheless end by assessing the film on its different merits. Theatre critic John Russell Taylor questioned whether the film can “in any but the loosest sense, be called the film of the play,” but ended up suggesting that it “has its own coherence, logic and style, and it is, above all, very funny.”32 Raymond Durgnat agreed that it was the film’s comedy which triumphed; sometimes the film “captures the play’s atmosphere,” but it is in the end “so funny that . . . it dissipates the play’s emotional voltage, its anxious strain and violence.” Durgnat unstintingly celebrated the fact that “For ninety minutes The Knack made me feel young again.”33 Similarly, an enthusiastic review in the US journal Film Quarterly opened with the words, “Vital! Exuberant! Joyous!” and praised Lester’s success in giving us “a breathtaking, freshly seen London.”34

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This deliberate shifting away from the play continued in critical accounts as the film was positioned as an auteur film of the mid sixties. For a while, Lester was in exalted company, compared not only to the French New Wave auteurs but also included in the emerging notion of the “Film Director as Superstar.”35 Alexander Walker, in his 1974 account, proclaimed that the film worked precisely because it was not “an idiosyncratic and dated film version of a play from the end of the 1950s” but a “manifesto” that arrived “at precisely the moment when society was ready for its celebration of youthful hedonism.”36 The de-coupling of play and film was clearly seen again when the DVD was released in 2000. Film Review expressed the view that “The Knack probably sums up Sixties ‘Swinging London,’” and any link to the “dark and sadistic” play is definitely seen as a disadvantage: The question was how would Lester and screenwriter Charles Wood turn it into an effervescent comedy? The answer was simple: ignore the play.

In keeping with this, Lester is quoted in the same article as saying that when making the film he wanted to “throw out all the things that seemed theatrical.”37 From the beginning, then, the process of adaptation involved detaching the film from its theatrical source and ceding Jellicoe’s authorship to Lester. Her authorship is gradually forgotten or cited as a problematic factor, and the adaptation goes on to be positioned and understood as a piece of cinema. And, unlike A Taste of Honey, the shift from a female to male author involved dropping recognition not only of its theatrical origins but also of its status as a “pre-feminist” text.

Bazin on “Theater and Cinema” Before Jellicoe slips over the horizon, however, it is worth listening to some of her comments about the play and about the nature of the theatre experience. Her accounts of seeing her play performed demonstrate her acute sense of audience response. She remembers following The Knack on its provincial tour and learning through this experience that “the play . . . will indeed be a different play . . . according to the audience with whom we see it.”38 Undergraduate audiences at Cambridge would “laugh twice at the same joke – they would see the joke coming and they would laugh when it came.”39 Some audiences could be difficult: “when the play went to . . . Bath, in the winter at the Theatre Royal . . . now people did walk out there.” But in London, with “very sophisticated theatre people,” she thought “[t]his is not obscene, this is quite child-like.”40

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Jellicoe’s comments on the difference the audience makes and her earlier remark about the timing of jokes in the film relates to one commonly cited difference between theatre and cinema – the impact of liveness. Liveness, it is argued, promotes the interaction between actors and audience that is seen to be a consequence of both actors and audience occupying the same space of the theatre at the same time. This can be exaggerated. Most audience members will experience the play only once, on the night on which they see it, and therefore do not themselves experience the differences that Jellicoe refers to. It should also be noted that cinema, too, is a social medium and that audiences can make a considerable difference to the experience and understanding of a film. Nevertheless, the quality of liveness is one of several medium-specific differences that have been identified as being crucial to adaptations from stage to screen. This transition is often deemed to be difficult partly because, as Susan Sontag points out, the “history of cinema is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models.”41 Far from emphasizing that such common roots mean that both cinema and theatre audiences are generally invited to follow a story and understand its meaning through a shared perception of aural and visual signs, the study of theatrical adaptations has tended to emphasize differences that apparently indicate a fundamental gap between the two experiences and make transposition difficult.42 In approaching The Knack, my purpose is to move away from liveness as the critical difference and to identify two other areas of difference which can be used to illuminate how the film works as an adaptation. The first of these is the difference between the stage and the screen in terms of the organization of space. André Bazin explored the implications of the stage as a “privileged spot,”43 removed from “everyday experience,”44 which renders significant any object or action that appears on it. As influential director Peter Brook put it in the 1960s, I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space while someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre.45

Offstage, the wings constitute a different space and, while the audience might be asked to construct imaginary settings off stage, they are not seen. By contrast, Bazin argues, in a film, the camera does not permit an offstage space but moves continually to reveal people or objects previously unseen. Sontag suggests that theatre is “confined to a logical or continuous use of space,” in which people are either on or off stage, while cinema involves the “continuous reinvention of space”46 through camera

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movement and editing which open up new areas or return to those previously seen. For Bazin, the difference means that a cinematic adaptation is based on a cinematic “reconversion into a window on to the world of a [theatrical] space oriented towards an inner dimension only.”47 Bert Cardullo translates this into a contrast between the intensive structure of theatre, with its focus on a restricted space and set of actions, and the extensive structure of cinema, which moves across space and time and offers the characters a widening range of possible actions.48 Out of such different concepts of space comes the common practice of “opening up” a play by taking at least some of its spatially confined scenes on location, in a move that adaptation practitioner, Phyllis Zatlin, describes as the shift from “theatrical to cinematic décor, that is from static interiors to exterior scenes.”49 And out of this, too, comes the different positioning of the audience created by cinematic editing. If editing allows the cinema audience to see what theatre audiences have to imagine in the wings, it also allows the audience onto the stage, the shot/reverse-shot editing of classical cinema putting us between or behind the actors rather than in a seat beyond and outside the stage.50 Bazin’s argument that cinema adaptations should respect theatre’s dramaturgical space thus suggests a profound change in approach with regard to spatial organization and the positioning of the audience. The second set of differences between theatre and cinema relates to the use of images and speech. Much has been made of the cinema’s reliance on the visual, with images as the key component of the language of cinema. Film scholars have, of course, emphasized the importance of dialogue, music, and diegetic sound in relation to the image and, in turn, theatre scholars argue that a play cannot be analyzed in terms of its written text alone (although Zatlin does suggest that the adaptation from stage to screen often involves the “conversion of the wordy exposition to movement and images”).51 Bazin refuses the split between written text and its setting and performance, arguing that “a play . . . is unassailably protected by the text” and that the “mode and style of production . . . are already embodied in the text.”52 The speaking of the written text in theatre and cinema therefore has to be related to the different organization of space and the position of the audience. From this comes another common distinction made between theatre and cinema: the different modes of performance and acting deemed appropriate in stage plays and films, and, in particular, the conventionally naturalist approach that dialogue in cinema often involves. Because of these differences in the organization of space and the consequent impact on performance modes, Bazin argues that the performance of the play cannot

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be simply replicated in cinema but also that cinema cannot just take over a play. The difficulty of adaptation is “transposing a text written for one dramaturgical system into another.”53 It is important to note that these differences are not intrinsic to the essences of theatre and cinema but relate to certain kinds of cinema and theatre. Theatre can expand beyond the boundaries of the theatrical stage and cinema can be inwardly focused, deliberately limiting what it shows and working with markedly artificial settings and dialogue. But the shift from theatre to cinema, evident in the filming of The Knack, does involve some of the more traditional differences identified above: the play is given new scenes which appear to rely on images rather than words, particularly in the use of visual gags; bit parts increase the number of characters beyond the three men and one woman of the original play; the setting moves well beyond the single room of the stage set, taking in not only other spaces in the house but also moving outside; the film involves extensive location shooting, giving the impression that the events it shows take place in a real house and using the streets of London for extended, almost wordless sequences. In many ways, Lester would seem to have been successful in his drive to blow the play up and lose the stage text – in terms of setting, performance, and words – through taking on the language of cinema. But the situation becomes more complex if we look at the film in terms of Bazin’s understanding of space and performance. This does not mean imposing Bazin’s concepts on the film but using them creatively to open up an account of the film that acknowledges its status as an adaptation.

Spatial organization in The Knack . . . and How to Get It The opening and closing credits of the film are quirky and playful. The opening credits aim to intrigue us, and the closing credits give the requisite information while reminding us of key moments of the film we have just seen. Both sequences are based on squares and horizontal lines. The opening credits start with a square on the screen, in which two lighted rectangles indicate windows at the top of a dark house. The next shots are from the inside and pick up on the strong horizontal lines of the venetian blinds and the striped sheets, making abstract patterns out of what will turn out to be the furnishings of Tolen’s room. The end credits resemble a sheet of stamps, with vertical and horizontal lines of perforations making squares, in which appear words of the credits and images repeated from the film. The strong lines, the abstractions based on the representations of real objects and

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people, the stylized and stylish effects all refer to the way in which space is organized in this adaptation. It is common to consider an adaptation of a play in terms of how the film opens out the original, and that is an important element in The Knack . . . and How to Get It. This exploration of the organization of space contrasts the use of the equivalent of the stage set – the room in Colin’s house where much of the action is set and more broadly the house itself – with the use of locations in London. But exploring this distinction between the internal space of the room/house and the public spaces of the locations, also involves making use of Cardullo’s distinction between horizontal and vertical space. My argument is that the film makes an association between the stage and vertically organized space and cinema and horizontally organized space, but that the distinction is a flexible one that allows theatrical space to be re-presented cinematically rather than erased. Thus, the organization of space in the film is marked by references to the different possibilities of theatrical organization of space so that one dramaturgical system is layered over the other. The house is the most important set in the film and the characters regularly return there. This works as a nod in the direction of the single room of the theatrical set but the film set has a more expansive and realistic dimension. Its dilapidated and eccentric décor was given a back story by the production designer, Assheton Gorton, who imagined that it had been bequeathed to Colin by his aunt, “a mad Art Deco do-it-yourself home decorator before the war.”54 As the film progresses, we see not only the main set – the room taken over by Tom – but also the kitchen, bathroom, and other bedrooms that are accessed off the staircase. It takes time to build up this geography, and it is significant that the establishing shot of the house from the outside is withheld until the arrival of Tom, and then Nancy, when we briefly see, from the outside, the whole house with its narrow front and three stories set next to a block of modern flats built on what was presumably a Second World War bomb site. This withholding of the establishing shot that would allow the audience a clearer sense of a realistic place indicates that the house’s spaces are to be used as symbolic stages for action. The lack of a stable position for the viewer is clear from the opening credits which shift from horizontal to vertical in a sequence set on the stairs of the house where a line of girls, the proverbial sixties “dolly birds,” snakes up to Tolen’s bedroom at the top of the house. Stripes and lines feature here in the girls’ vertically ribbed white jumpers set against the horizontal stripe of their schoolboy belts; their vertical bodies, tapped and tested by Tolen,

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7.3 Knack’s witheringly ironic examination of sexual politics begins with shots of the queue of identically dressed women, waiting to be serviced by Tolen (Ray Brooks).

bend languorously to swallow an oyster or apply perfume at the ankle (Illustration 7.3). This is not a stage set, but the scene serves to establish the metaphoric function of the stairs as a vertical site of continually blocked passage. In the credits, the blockage is experienced by Colin, who protests at the invasion of his house by Tolen’s conquests, but, as the film goes on, it becomes clear that the blocked vertical well of the stairs is a source of most concern to Tolen. The hall and stairs are blocked consecutively by wooden bars on the front door, furniture discarded by Tom the new lodger, and Colin’s new bed. Throughout, Tolen protests that his sex life is being ruined and complains to his landlord, Colin, “I want access.” The film thus starts with Tolen’s takeover of the stairs via his women visitors, but the space soon becomes disputed territory, blocked by both Colin and Tom. At the end of the film, Nancy’s dominance over Tolen and the beginnings of her claim on Colin are demonstrated when she walks down the now clear stairs, forcing Tolen and Colin to back down ahead of her. The symbolic function of the staircase is an extreme example of the protean nature of the house décor; its primary purpose is to mark out territory and provide a space for the interactions between characters. The whirling camera movement that ends the opening sequence may indicate that it is Colin’s fantasy, but the graffiti left by the waiting girls remains on the stairwell throughout the film as evidence of Tolen’s power. With the hall and staircase blocked, characters use the windows as doors and pop in and out of rooms as if in a stage farce. Tom’s determination to transform his brown, cluttered room allows the audience to see the stage being literally set for the two key confrontation scenes – the lion-taming sequence and the scene in which Tolen succeeds in fascinating Nancy. It is reminiscent of the

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white box of Peter Brook’s theatrical production, the closest the film comes to the focused and marked-out space of a stage. Tom attempts to use this empty, translucent room, furnished only with a mirror and a set of roomdividing shelves, as a space for transformative play, but it is the setting in which Tolen’s dominance and his capacity to disrupt the group is most clearly established. One should note, though, that the editing in these more theatrical sequences combines the audience position of theatre, where we can see all four characters at once against the white background, with the cross-cutting and shot/reverse-shot system of cinema. In filming these theatrical scenes relatively straight, the film nevertheless uses the devices of cinema to give access to expressive close-ups and to position the spectator between the characters as they move around the room/set. The film, however, also continually leaves the house, opening up the play in a traditional fashion by taking the characters outdoors. It is in these scenes that the film shifts to the horizontal axis, most markedly in the muchpraised sequence in which Nancy first meets Colin and Tom and joins them in wheeling the iron bed back to the house, but also in other much shorter sequences as, for instance, when Nancy walks along the side of the Barracks talking to the soldiers. These sequences, indeed, appear to offer that unrolling revelation of space which Bazin proposed as a key feature of cinema since, in them, the characters, their modes of transport, and the camera all move along the screen horizontally. Thus, in the bed sequence, the camera is positioned through a panning or tracking shot so that it can follow the progress of the trio as, for example, when they use the bed as a trampoline, the tracking camera recording their bouncing heads that appear and disappear above the horizontal line of the wall. The jokes often depend on how the horizontal space is organized and how successfully elements that block progress are maneuvered. When a framed picture is carried across the path of the horizontally moving bed, the joke depends on the fact that these two paths must coincide as they do when Colin goes head first through the canvas. The joke is reversed when, in the chase sequence, the rope which Tom and Colin string horizontally across the motorbike’s trajectory fails to stop Tolen and Nancy, who duck below it. The film’s use of location shooting in these sequences has been identified as its most significant feature in terms of its presentation of London, but it is the combination of location shooting with ongoing movement that makes its exploration of London so engaging. However, this unrolling of space horizontally which permits us (sometimes) to see what is bound to happen next does not reveal the world with the ease and naturalness that Bazin celebrated. Instead, the editing draws

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attention to the fact that its setting is a construction rather than a preexisting source of revelation. London is here jumbled up, its famous monuments set alongside shabby streets and waste ground. Following directions for how to get to the YMCA, Nancy arrives at Buckingham Palace. A cut from the trio maneuvering the bed down the steps of a backstreet railway bridge takes us to the steps of the Albert Hall; the two spaces are clearly not connected, and the cut, while it links together two different sets of steps, does not set them into a spatial relationship. The film’s construction processes are also displayed in the composition of the image. The film’s referencing of silent cinema’s comedy leads it to adopt the fixed spectatorial position of the theatrical audience so that the joke can be seen in one shot. At such moments, the camera is fixed in the ideal position for seeing the whole space in which the action will be completed. Thus, during the bed-moving sequence, as Nancy and Colin maneuver the bed down the street, around the triangular exterior of the pub and back up its other side, the camera is positioned head on, with the result that in the same shot we can also see Tom’s action of going in the door on one side of the pub and exiting seamlessly, with refreshments, from the other side to re-join the bed. And, in an extended sequence during the chase, the camera is placed in a fixed position, giving a view of a horizontal wall of derelict doors that provides the basis for a series of visual jokes as the trio chase each other in, out, and along the doors. In these examples, the camera movement associated with cinema is halted and a more theatrical point of view adopted. This example is also significant in terms of how the composition of the image relies on framings, squares, and edges that define objects within the screen’s frame. This is true even of the film’s more naturalistic settings; the school where Colin teaches, for example, is a modern building with rectangular windows, divided into further rectangles and squares, while Buckingham Palace is filmed from the front as an unlovely rectangle. As with the string of doors, many jokes depend on movement across or within frames. The luggage locker, where Nancy fails to leave her case because closing one door seems to lead to another opening, is filmed head on so that the larger square of the whole unit is seen to consist of a series of smaller squares made by the doors of individual lockers. The Knightsbridge shop, where Nancy tries on a dress, features two adjacent dressing rooms with a shared curtain so that pulling the curtain to cover the open side of one changing room exposes the other square of space next door. In the chase sequence, Colin and Tom pass through a photography shoot in which the models are framed within the empty

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windows of a derelict building. In each case, the off-screen space of cinema is deliberately cut off, and the joke or comment depends on understanding the framing within the frame. In terms of the organization of space through editing and camera position, this adaptation does not, I would argue, replace one dramaturgical organization with another. Instead, in the house the film uses strongly theatrical elements of spatial organization with the emphasis on vertical movement that is frequently blocked. In addition, the film curtails the cinematic opening out associated with location shooting by consistently drawing attention to the conventions of cinematic editing in the creation of space and at points denying the mobility of the spectator in the interests of comprehending that space. This suggests that, despite Lester’s declared ambitions, the film cannot just cast off its theatrical source.

Language, performance, and the accusation of rape As in the play, Nancy’s accusation of rape seems to confirm Tolen’s earlier suggestion that rape is a female fantasy; the use of the allegation to indicate the point at which Nancy turns the tables on Tolin later marked the film, like the play, as problematic. Early reviewers did not find much worthy of comment in this use of rape and, strikingly, a 1967 review by academic Marsha Kinder is positive about Nancy’s realization that she “can impose her fantasy – that rape has occurred – on the others” and argues that Colin and Nancy can move towards a “human relationship which recognizes the individuality of both” through sharing “the mutually attractive fantasy that Colin has raped her.”55 But Lester recalled that the film’s reputation was damaged later when “feminists were outraged . . . there was a period of about 10 or 15 years when it was a pariah film.”56 Tushingham, like the theatre historians cited earlier, reflected that the film was made before the feminist movement took hold . . . Certainly no offence was intended, though years later people were critical of that scene. I can understand why given the current climate of political correctness and so on.57

The problem of the “rape scene” has meant that even a sympathetic commentator like Danny Powell argues that “for modern viewers the movie presents a significant problem and that is probably why . . . it remains to a large extent hidden.”58 Bruce Carson considers that “in today’s cultural climate, the fact of rape, imaginary or otherwise, would not be seen as a suitable topic for comedy,”59 while for Pamela Church Gibson, Nancy’s allegation seems “not only to suggest the false-memory syndrome so often

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attributed to women, but also to concur with the male fantasy of rape as wish-fulfilment.” Jellicoe’s authorship returns here but not, as with Delaney, helpfully, since Church Gibson finds that the “use of rape as the material for a series of jokes . . . is worrying in itself, and doubly so when the writer is a woman.”60 I am sympathetic to the argument that the changed social and political context of rape makes its use in The Knack . . . and How to Get It problematic but these judgments raise the same issue – of applying worked-through feminist positions out of context – as those of the feminist theatre historians cited earlier. I agree with Powell that the accusation of rape “does reveal much of the confusion of the time” in terms of attitudes to women’s sexuality but not that “the portrayal of rape is grossly miscalculated.”61 The sequence in which Nancy accuses Tolen of rape and then invites Colin to repeat the act that never happened needs to be placed not just in the context of the time but also in the context of the film itself. An argument about miscalculation or confusion needs to acknowledge that there is no confusion in the handling of the “rape scene” and that the film at this point continues its highly effective integration of theatrical and cinematic modes. The scene takes place in an opened-out setting, which is handled, as other such settings are, by being transferred from the room inside the house to location shooting in a typical London square. But the shift to location shooting does not blot out the more theatrical modes of representing space. The use of the square, clearly separated from the surrounding streets by hedges and railings, serves to differentiate between onstage and offstage space; the square is the place where the action will take place, a fact reinforced by the difficulty experienced, literally and metaphorically, by Colin in getting on to the site of action as he struggles to avoid being impaled on the metal railings that mark out the boundary. This creation of an equivalence of a stage allows Nancy’s accusation to be set up as a speech and delivered in a non-naturalistic manner which links the organization of space to the use of language and performance. We have seen that the language of the play (Jellicoe’s “carefully mannered dialogue”) was one of the elements retained by Lester and Wood, and the film script uses conventions of speech that are very different from those of cinema. The characteristic conversational dialogue of mainstream films is replaced by a range of different language uses that are overtly performed. The film starts with Colin addressing the camera in a cross between a monologue addressed to the viewer and a despairing lecture to himself; a chorus of elderly voices quotes and mangles familiar phrases and proverbs in a commentary of disapproval of youthful behavior; the (unseen)

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schoolboys chant Colin’s remonstrations and Tolen’s mantras; written slogans accompany the do-it-yourself demonstration when Colin barricades the front door; and Nancy’s “I feel . . . funny” and Tolen’s “Come . . . come . . . come upstairs” have double meanings. In all of these examples, words become malleable, and sentences are deprived of their structure; obvious meanings are undermined by innuendos and jokes; rules are parroted and commonplace phrases transformed; and barriers are put up to the expression of real feeling, which slips out in stuttered phrases. In this treatment of words and in the highly stylized way they are performed, the film acknowledges its origins in the theatre. The use of rape as a plot turn builds on the film’s challenge to the apparently straightforward meaning of language. The scene begins at the end of the chase sequence. Tolen and Nancy leave the motorbike and begin to play around in the square. A series of long shots and tight close-ups show how Tolen continues to impose his courtship on Nancy and her increasingly troubled response. They sit on the grass and, in a repeated shot, Tolen begins to remove his signature black gloves as the banal but ominous sound of separating Velcro fills the soundtrack. Nancy leaps up and begins to perform a speech, addressing Tolen on the ground, but also directly addressing the audience apparently positioned beneath her as if in the front row of the theatre. The speech is rhetorically addressed to Tolen (“What is it? What do you want with me?”), but there is no reverse shot of Tolen, nor any indication that he might interrupt this theatrical address. As Nancy speaks, her words become more and more broken up (“just you don’t better come near me . . . just you don’t . . . come near me . . . come, come”) and although, as Neil Sinyard noted, “the attraction-repulsion tension of the speech” is expressed visually through the “alternation of reverse and forward zooms,”62 the length of the speech, and the way Nancy/Tushingham declaims it, remind us of the film’s theatrical origins. Her ambiguous desires cannot be expressed meaningfully with words, and she falls into an orgasmic faint but, despite the inadequacy of language, her mode of direct address and Tolen’s passivity in front of it indicate that it is through the performance of language that she might challenge his control. It is surely significant that this key moment for Nancy is also the moment when the film comes closest to a theatrical aesthetic and offers an example of how the source play “is unassailably protected by the text.”63 Colin and Tom come running up to find Nancy prone and Tolen bemused; the camera work becomes more like that of a conventionally filmed play, with the camera positioned so that all the characters can be seen in a long shot. The interaction between them is observed from this distance .

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rather than seen through close-ups and cutting until Nancy recovers and sits up; her pronouncement, “I’ve been raped, raped” returns us to cinematic editing and is marked by three jump cuts that make the young men zoom around the square. Performing language allows Nancy to use her repeated and controversially playful cry of “Rape” as a challenge to male power. As she leaves the square, she begins to practice saying it outside the group, failing to get it out to the policeman but chanting it successfully in the street so that the windows fly up in the flats behind her. She returns to the house and takes over Tolen’s room, repeating the word in different ways, drawing out the vowels or chirruping the consonants, mixing it up with other phrases and rhythms (‘“Whitehall One Two One Two”’) to the accompaniment of Colin’s protests and the clash of cymbals. The word (uncomfortably to ears attuned by feminism) begins to lose its meaning; it becomes a series of sounds, a signifier which Nancy tests out until it is replaced by a meaningless but controlled semi-wail, addressed to a mask. It is not just the actress but the character who is giving a performance here, and Nancy’s performance has the effect of emptying the word of its meaning and putting her in charge of its use and definition. On leaving Tolen’s bedroom, Nancy begins to establish the context in which she can make sense of the word again. In the kitchen, she talks at/ to Colin in a scene that uses a series of cinematic shot/reverse-shots to emphasize where she now finds her desires taking her. Tolen tries to literally come between them, but they move around him; and Nancy now redefines language – “he raped me marvellous super” – to mean both an act that has not yet taken place and an act in which she is a full participant. The film does not recognize how attitudes to rape are going to make its jokes unacceptable, but Nancy’s attempts to claim the word “rape” for her own purposes can be seen as providing a recognition, rather literally, of women’s lack of access, in the early sixties, to language about their own sexual desires and their consequent dependence on male definitions of how they felt. And the destabilizing of language that allows Nancy this limited power is generated by a mode of performance (the direct address of a speech to the audience) and a use of non-realist speech patterns, which owe much to the way in which the film has re-presented its theatrical origins. Many adaptations call attention to their status as adaptations and are known to audiences as such. The Knack . . . and How to Get It is something rather different, an example of a film that explicitly distances itself from its theatrical origins to emphasize its status as cinema and the authorship of the director. And yet, it may now be necessary to read it as an adaptation if we

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are to make sense of how it works. A literal reading of the rape sequence that takes Nancy’s accusation at face value and ignores the theatrical origins of the film and her speech cannot explain its function. Treating The Knack as a swinging London film leads to its being subsumed into an account of the move to a more liberal expression of sexuality in the sixties, in which the rape allegation, if discussed at all, becomes an unfortunate example of how rape could be treated as a joke; such an account ignores the dark edge of Tolen’s threat and Nancy’s desperation. Approaching it as an adaptation allows us to see how the practices of theatre and cinema are layered in the film with the use of two kinds of dramaturgical space and of dialogue that requires the cadences of theatrical speech. Lester and many critics claim that he blew up the play, but it might be better to accept The Knack . . . and How to Get It as an example of what Dudley Andrew, discussing Bazin, calls “an ultimately intransigent text,” in which “the uniqueness of [certain elements of] the original text is . . . left unassimilated in adaptation.”64 Or to re-work one of Bazin’s phrases, “like marble from a quarry,” the source continues to shape the work that derives from it.65 Notes 1. Peter Cowie, Revolution! The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s (London: Faber & Faber, 2004): 150. 2. See John Hill, Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956–1963 (London: BFI, 1986): 35–52 for an account of how the film industry created publicity in this way. 3. Michael Kustow, “The Knack at the Theatre Royal Bath” [January 1962], reprinted in The Encore Reader, ed. Charles Marowitz, Tom Milne, and Owen Hale (London: Methuen, 1965): 222. 4. John Russell Taylor, Anger and After (London: Methuen, 1962): 78 and 79–80. 5. Kimball King, Twenty Modern British Playwrights (New York: Garland, 1977): 65. 6. Judith Thompson, “‘The World Made Flesh’: Women and Theatre,” in The Death of the Playwright, ed. A. Page (London: Macmillan, 1992): 38. 7. Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright, Changing Stages (London: Bloomsbury, 2000): 250. 8. Susan Bennett, “New Plays and Women’s Voices in the 1950s,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights, ed. Elaine Aston and Janelle Reinelt (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 40. 9. Ibid. 10. Helene Keyssar, Feminist Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1984). 11. Lizbeth Goodman, Contemporary Feminist Theatre (London: Routledge, 1993): 77. 12. Lib Taylor, “Early Stages: Women Dramatists 1958–68,” in British and Irish Women Dramatists since 1958, ed. Trevor R. Griffiths and Margaret LlewellynJones (Oxford University Press, 1993): 9 and 11.

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13. Jozefina Komporaly, Staging Motherhood: British Women Playwrights 1956– Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006): 16. 14. Ibid., 20. 15. Taylor, “Early Stages”: 19. 16. Keyasser, Feminist Theatre: 47 and 49. 17. Taylor, “Early Stages”: 23. 18. Keyasser, Feminist Theatre: 50. 19. Rita Tushingham, for instance, began at Liverpool Playhouse, took over the part of Jo from the Theatre Workshop actor, Frances Kuka, in the film of A Taste of Honey, played the part of Nancy in The Knack and carried it over into the film though all three male parts were taken by different actors. 20. Interview with Robert Rubens in Behind the Scenes: Theatre and Film Interviews from the Translantic Review, ed. Joseph F. McCrindle (London: Pitman Publishing, 1971): 310. For a discussion of the interaction between theatre and cinema during the period 1956–1965, see Stephen Lacey, British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in its Context, 1956–1965 (London: Routledge, 1995). 21. Tony Richardson, Long Distance Runner (London: Faber and Faber, 1993): 108. 22. Phil Wickham, Review of A Taste of Honey, BFI Screen on Line at www.screen online.org.uk/film/id/439975. See Terry Lovell, “Landscape and Stories in 1960s British Realism,” Screen, 31.4 (1990): 357–376 for a critical but sympathetic account which led this reassessment. 23. “The Front Page,” Sight and Sound, 31.2 (Spring 1962): 55. 24. Neil Sinyard, Richard Lester (Manchester University Press, 2010) discusses the film in a chapter entitled “Swingin’ Sixties.” See also Bruce Carson, “Comedy, Sexuality and ‘Swinging London’ Films,” Journal of Popular British Cinema, 1 (1998): 49–62. 25. Harriet Devine, Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956–2006 (London: Faber and Faber, 2006): 179. 26. Ian Cameron and Mark Shivas, “Interview with Richard Lester,” Movie, 16 (Winter 1968–1969): 22. 27. “Interview with Dick Lester,” Films and Filming, 11.10 (July 1965): 14. 28. Cameron and Shivas, “Interview”: 22. 29. Review of The Knack, Movie, 13 (Summer 1965): 45. 30. Review of The Knack, Monthly Film Bulletin, 32.377 (June 1965): 88. 31. Andrew Sarris, Review of The Knack, Village Voice, July 8, 1965: 13. 32. John Russell Taylor, Sight and Sound, 34.3 (July 1965): 148. 33. Raymond Durgnat, “The Knack,” Films and Filming, 11.10 (July 1965): 25. 34. Yale Udoff, “The Knack,” Film Quarterly, 19.1 (Fall 1965): 55 and 57. 35. Lester, Arthur Penn, Mike Nicols, and Stanley Kubrik were described as “Independents with Muscle” in Joseph Gelmis, The Film Director as Superstar (New York: Doubleday, 1970). 36. Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Michael Joseph, 1974): 263–264. Walker’s mistake in changing the date of the play serves to position the film even more clearly as belonging to a different generation.

The shift from stage to screen in The Knack 37. 38. 39. 40.

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Howard Maxford, “The Knack,” Film Review, 599 (November 2000): 87. Quoted in Thompson, “‘The World Made Flesh’”: 40. Devine, Looking Back: 178. “Interview with Ann Jellicoe,” British Library, Theatre Archive Project, www. bl.uk/projects/theatrearchive/jellicoe.html. It was at Bath that Michael Kustow commented that the audience was largely made up of “old ladies and gents.” “The Knack at the Theatre Royal Bath”: 222. 41. Susan Sontag, “Film and Theatre,” in Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974): 249. 42. An important exception to this is Linda Hutcheon’s categorization of both film and theatre as performance media that show rather than tell their stories in A Theory of Adaptation (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006). 43. André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part Two,” in What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971): 104. 44. André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part One,” in What is Cinema?: 89. 45. Peter Brook, The Empty Stage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996): 9. 46. Sontag, “Film and Theatre”: 256–257 (emphasis in the original). 47. Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part Two”: 111. 48. Bert Cardullo, “Theater into Film,” Yale Review, 94.2 (April 2006): 88–111. 49. Phyllis Zatlin, Theatrical Translation and Film Adaptation (Clevedon, Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005): 175. 50. Jellicoe’s play text says that “the acting area should be as close to the audience as possible,” suggesting that she wanted some breaching of the audience’s distance. The Knack (London: Faber and Faber, 1964): 10. 51. Zatlin, Theatrical Translation: 174. 52. Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part One”: 84. 53. Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part Two”: 106. 54. Quoted in Elizabeth-Marie Tuson, “Consumerism, the Swinging Sixties and Assheton Gorton,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 2.1 (2005): 104. 55. Marsha Kinder, Review of The Knack . . . and How to Get It, Film Society Review (March 1967): 32. 56. Quoted in Maxford, “The Knack”: 90. 57. Ibid. 58. Danny Powell, Studying British Cinema: The 1960s (Leighton Buzzard, UK: Auteur Publishing, 2009): 156. 59. Carson, “Comedy, Sexuality and ‘Swinging London’ Films”: 58. 60. Pamela Church Gibson, “From Up North to Up West? London on Screen 1965–1967,” London Journal, 31.1 (June 2006): 95. 61. Powell, Studying British Cinema: 156 and 175. 62. Sinyard, Richard Lester: 40. 63. Bazin, “Theater and Cinema – Part One”: 84. 64. Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (London: Athlone Press, 2000): 30.

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65. André Bazin, “The Stylistics of Robert Bresson,” in What is Cinema?: 136. I am sincerely grateful to members of the Scandinavian network Adaptation in Context for the invitation to meet with them and other scholars at a very productive workshop on adaptation in December 2010 at which a version of this chapter was given. Particular thanks to Anne Gjelsvik for organizing the workshop so effectively and to Eirik Hanssen whose presentation on Bazin helped me think through some of the ideas discussed here.

chapter 8

See-thru desire and the dream of gay marriage: Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane on stage and screen James Campbell

Joe Orton’s first brush with fame arose not through drama, but through crime. Between 1959 and 1962 he and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, engaged in a series of clandestine assaults on public decency. They stole hundreds of books from the Islington and Hampstead public libraries; once back in their shared flat, they altered the book-jacket illustrations and added less than respectful blurbs to previously blank jacket flaps. They then snuck the volumes back into the libraries. When they were eventually arrested and found guilty of vandalism, the news made a headline in the Daily Mirror. Read sympathetically, Orton and Halliwell’s acts of apparent literary vandalism were in fact acts of cultural criticism: they tended to deface books they considered hopelessly middlebrow, and their scrapes with obscenity obviously critique bourgeois sexual repression.1 But aside from the artifacts themselves, the acts of vandalism can also be seen as Orton’s first explorations of performance-based art. After having spent most of the 1950s writing unpublishable novels, both with Halliwell and by himself, this was a movement, in its own small way, toward the public sphere. For Orton liked not only to place the altered volumes back onto the shelves, but then to loiter about the libraries in order to observe the shock and dismay of patrons as they discovered the nature of the changes.2 This was undoubtedly his first experience of watching an audience confront his work. Both Orton and Halliwell spent six months in prison for their critical endeavors. When Orton emerged, he turned from fiction to drama. He wrote three full-length plays, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot, and What the Butler Saw, as well as a number of shorter radio and television scripts and a never-produced film script for the Beatles; this creative spree was cut short in 1967 when Halliwell murdered Orton in their home, then committed suicide. From 1964 to the posthumous production of What the Butler Saw in 1969, Orton was the enfant terrible of British drama, and it is easy to imagine 145

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him continuing a role he discovered in the suburban libraries of London: surreptitiously watching his audience watching his work, delighted by their discomfiture, feeling the more successful the more he caused outrage, and even creating a fictitious amateur critic, Mrs. Edna Welthorpe, to fan the fires in the editorial pages of the Daily Telegraph.3 Yet Orton and Halliwell’s years of literary struggle during the fifties had taught Orton, at least, a valuable lesson. It is easy to shock the British middle class; every unpublished novel Orton and Halliwell produced was fully capable of achieving that mild goal. What is difficult is to make them enjoy the insult enough to pay for the privilege of it. The Edna Welthorpes of the world must be appalled, but others must join in on the laughter. The plays must invite some of the audience, at least, to join the playwright halfhidden in the bookshelves, snickering behind the back of the offended bourgeois library patron. Orton’s art lies in allowing the audience to feel sympathy, not so much for any of the characters on stage, but for the character in front of it, the one who gets the jokes and is thereby excluded from what is being mocked under the stage lights. Entertaining Mr. Sloane is a three-act drama with four characters: the family of Kath, Ed, and their father Kemp, and the outsider Sloane, who becomes a lodger in the home that Kath and Kemp share, but that seems to be owned by Ed. The barest outline of the plot demonstrates the play’s dark comedy and self-conscious attack on bourgeois values. The young, svelte Sloane is picked up by the middle-aged Kath at a library, and by the end of the first act, she has seduced him (Illustration 8.1). Ed, meanwhile, is leering after Sloane in as obvious a manner as the mid-sixties British stage will

8.1 Mr. Sloane (Peter McEnery) is first spied by Kath (Beryl Reid) sunbathing in the cemetery, and he quickly becomes the object of her intense desire, as the glamour close-up suggests.

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8.2 Kath’s brother Ed (Harry Andrews) turns Mr. Sloane into a chauffeur, dressed in bespoke leather, and later into his lover.

8.3 After Mr. Sloane murders Kemp, Kath and Ed blackmail him into constituting a ménage à trois, with the young man becoming a virtual prisoner.

bear;4 Ed eventually hires Sloane as a chauffeur, if only to get him to wear a tight leather uniform (Illustration 8.2). Kemp is the only character who is unimpressed with the young man, largely because Kemp suspects him of murdering Kemp’s former employer. In the final act Sloane kills Kemp to keep him from contacting the police; Kath (who is now pregnant) and Ed turn this to their advantage by blackmailing Sloane into splitting his time and his sexual services between the two siblings: essentially, they have agreed to share Sloane sexually, while Sloane himself has little say in the matter (Illustration 8.3). In this chapter, I have set myself two tasks: first to develop a reading of Mr. Sloane as a play, then to compare the text of the play to the 1970 film directed by Douglas Hickox. In the first instance, I want to trace the family relations of the play, especially the way in which Sloane plays simultaneous

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multiple roles within the fantasy lives of the other three characters. One of the primary ongoing controversies in the scholarship on Orton is the seeming inevitability of needing to interpret Orton’s plays in light of his biography; consequently, the particular dramatic form given to Orton’s life in the standard biography, John Lahr’s 1978 Prick Up Your Ears (and the 1987 film based on it), has created a critical backlash in the last few decades. To choose from among several objecting voices, Randall S. Nakayama characterizes Lahr’s biography as one that sees Orton exclusively through the lens of a pop psychoanalysis that insists that all of his later relationships be understood as attempts to redress gaps he felt from the inadequacy of his family upbringing.5 In my reading of the play, I thus attempt to avoid overt biographical connections, and I see the family in Mr. Sloane not in terms of Lahr’s nostalgia for any failings in Orton’s own family, but as foregrounding the much more general failure of desire to flow in the only directions bourgeois society has prepared for it. In looking at the film version, I shall stress what I see as its primary emendation to Orton’s script: the direct evocation of same-sex marriage in the final scene. I read this change in two ways: in the context of the film’s original distribution in 1970, it presents the specter of gay marriage as just that: a specter, or hallucination, that tends to limit the more jarring sexual implications of Orton’s play. Viewing the film from the perspective of forty years later, however, when gay marriage has become one of the most visible aspects of the concurrent changes in public discourse about same-sex desire, the film’s ending can be seen as legitimizing not just same-sex monogamy, but mixed-sex polyamory. In 1970 stretching the boundaries of traditional marriage to cover either situation seemed equally absurd; now, resistance to the former seems quaint while the latter possibility may, as a result, seem even queerer.

Sexual negotiations: Sloane on stage In his ambitious 1991 queer studies milestone Sexual Dissidence, Jonathan Dollimore places Orton’s drama in the context of sexual anarchy, of using dramatic roles to “transgress accepted norms at every point” without replacing them with other norms that are easily mistaken for the “authentic.”6 Aligning Orton with Fredric Jameson’s version of the postmodern, Dollimore reads Orton’s What the Butler Saw as parody and pastiche, yet stalwart in its refusal to allow a substitution of a new value in place of the one parodied. Given What the Butler Saw’s prominent inclusion of crossdressing, nudity, onstage seductions, and mad psychiatrists who police

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others’ sanity, Orton’s final play would seem an ideal example of Dollimore’s subversive tradition.7 Mr. Sloane is tame in comparison, yet its subversive potential for 1964 was considerable. Most importantly, it gives us the title character as a kind of free-floating sexual signifier: Sloane is both child and lover to Kath, while representing both rough trade and redemption-from-the-gutter project for Ed. To Kemp he plays the role of the violent displacement of the old by the young, a kind of incarnation of the generational fears represented by Alex DeLarge in Anthony Burgess’s 1962 A Clockwork Orange.8 Sloane is able to represent each of these roles for the characters, despite their more than occasional self-contradictions, with no apparent effort whatsoever. Sloane is a consummate actor able to perform any role as easily as changing clothes. Yet it is Sloane’s flexibility that ultimately compromises his freedom: when he overplays his generational-threat role by killing Kemp, he weakens himself and allows Kath and Ed an opportunity to force him into the roles they desire for him. But even then, Kath and Ed agree that the last thing they require from Sloane would be consistency and authenticity; rather, they want precisely half of Sloane’s time to be devoted to playing the roles they impose on him. What he does with the other half of his time is clearly of no concern to either. Neither Kath nor Ed, in other words, wants to settle the role chosen for Sloane; they want him to continue to flaunt his previously demonstrated virtuosity in negotiating the mutually contradictory functions they have set for him, so long as he does so according to their timeframe.9 We are first introduced to the pairing of Sloane and Kath: Kath, a woman in her early forties, has picked up Sloane at a local library (scene of Orton and Halliwell’s crime spree), and she immediately begins to inform him of the role she would like him to play. She provides Sloane with the details of her previous life: she became pregnant as a teenager by a boy even younger than herself, and her brother forced her to give the baby boy up for adoption. She has since lived a lonely life taking care of her father, Kemp. Since Sloane has also presented himself as an orphan, Kath makes the connection between her child and Sloane: “You’re almost the same age as he would be.”10 There seems to be no question of Sloane’s being literally Kath’s child; Sloane’s back story centering on two dead parents with whom he lived until he was eight is never questioned.11 Rather, Kath is articulating her desire that Sloane play the role of her lost child, and Sloane immediately intuits how this is to be done. His reply to Kath, “I need . . . understanding” (68, ellipsis in original), plays into her desire to be both mother and lover to a man younger than herself. Her desire for Sloane is based on her need to give him motherly understanding and to

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recapture the idea of herself as a vivacious and desirable girl. Thus at least three sexual elements are involved in this brief but paradigmatic exchange: Kath’s recapturing her role as mother, as object of young masculine desire, and as subject of her own desire for Sloane’s young masculine beauty. In a strictly Freudian interpretation, we might spend considerable energy in attempting to decide which, if any, of these desires is the primary and which is the sublimated form of a more basic libidinal cathexis.12 In the world of Orton’s plays, however, such questions are misguided. It is neither the case that Kath’s desire for Sloane is a form of her more basic desire to mother him, nor is the reverse case any more valid. Rather, the maternal and the sexual are both desires that demand to be fulfilled, and simultaneous fulfillment is Kath’s ideal. Kath thus tacitly asks Sloane to represent both the father of her child and the child himself. In acquiescing to the one, Sloane also acquiesces to the other. By the time Ed arrives in the household, Kath has already taken advantage of an altercation between Sloane and Kemp quite literally to get Sloane out of his pants. She justifies her projected relationship with him by claiming “He hasn’t any mamma of his own. I’m to be his mamma” (83). And the first Act ends on a comedic high note when Kath, having rather sloppily attempted to seduce Sloane, finally succeeds by rolling on top of him and exclaiming “What a big heavy baby you are. Such a big heavy baby” (95). In the moments leading up to this consummation of all her desires, Kath has been wearing only a negligee, a costume decision on which she comments to Sloane: “they make garments so thin nowadays you’d think they intended to provoke rape” (93). The transparent dress is an apt symbol for Kath’s, and ultimately all of the characters’, desires in the play. As is common in Orton’s works, Kath believes she is being quite subtle in her suggestive language and her broad hints, yet her message to both Sloane and the audience is just as transparent as her nightie. Desire cannot be hidden, and the more the characters try, the more ridiculous they appear. Though he falls short of wearing see-through clothes, Ed’s investment in Sloane is no subtler than his sister’s. When he learns that Kath has taken a lodger, he immediately tries to dissuade her, primarily on the basis that her living with a young single man will reflect badly on Ed among his business associates. Immediately upon meeting, or rather seeing, Sloane, Ed begins to construct him into an idealized version of his younger self. He first imagines Sloane’s life as an orphan, clarifying his fantasy of an all-male orphanage packed with young boys. After shooing Kath out of the room Ed is still committed to asking Sloane to leave, though his resolve begins to waver. Sloane plays into Ed’s transparent desires by confessing an interest in

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military life, which both parallels Ed’s background and further plays into his preferences for homosocial situations. By this time, Ed has decided to bribe Sloane into leaving: “I’d like to give you a little present” (85). But before Sloane has even had time to move the negotiations beyond the joking stage of pretending to ask for sports cars, Ed has begun leading the witness: “Are you a sports fan? Eh? Fond of sport? You look as though you might be. Look the . . . outdoor type, I’d say” (85, ellipsis in original). The remainder of the play tacitly demonstrates that Sloane is anything but the outdoor type. He will spend the next two Acts avoiding work, staying out late drinking with his friends and joyriding in Ed’s car, and happily being simultaneously infantilized and sexually pampered by Kath. The only exercise he seems to get or want comes from bullying Kemp. Sloane’s real skills lie not in sports but in reading others’ desires and molding himself to fulfill them, appear to fulfill them, or as in the case of Ed until the very end of the play, appear to want to fulfill them without actually doing so. Sloane is a chameleon of object choice, all things to all desirers. He thus takes up Ed’s hints about sports very swiftly, turning his fulfillment of Ed’s implied wishes into a kind of athletic striptease, a litany of sports events in which Sloane has excelled. He ends his invocation with arched-eyebrow suggestiveness: “Yes, yes. I’m an all rounder. A great all rounder. In anything you care to mention. Even in life” (86). Having communicated part of his desire to Sloane, Ed must now clarify his position. He wants Sloane to be an athlete, but athleticism to Ed means more than merely bodily prowess (though it clearly does mean that); it also involves “clean living. You may as well know I set great store by morals” (87). Ed thus sets up a self-contradictory set of identities for Sloane, much as Kath has already done in demanding that Sloane be both her lost son and lost lover at once. For Ed, Sloane must be both a sexual and a moral ideal. He must be both an illicit potential liaison (illicit at the very least in the sense that male same-sex relations in Britain remained illegal at the time of the play’s writing and production) and a YMCA-ready example of lost youth redeemed through the upright example of bourgeois middle-aged manhood. Intriguingly, both Ed’s and Kath’s fantasies involve Sloane playing the role of the same person: Ed’s “mate,” with whom Ed “used to do all what you’ve just said” (86) – ostensibly athletics, but implicitly sex – who is also the young man who fathered the child Ed forced Kath to give up for adoption. The fantasies are thus eerily congruent yet radically incompatible, for when Ed insists on moral rectitude and clean living, it is specifically heterosexual relations he is rejecting: “Too much of this casual bunking up nowadays. Too many lads being ruined by birds. I don’t want you messing

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about with my sister” (87). Ed wants Sloane to be his old mate and thus allow Ed to recapture his youth, symbolically lost when the mate betrayed their relationship by impregnating Kath. Sloane must be the mate prior to his fall into dirty heterosexuality; it would seem, then, that any sexual relationship with Kath would turn Sloane into the post-lapsarian mate and thus make him useless to Ed, another depressing example of the compulsion to repeat. In fact, this turns out not to be the case, as the audience sees at the end of the play. In the meantime, however, by the end of their first interview, Ed has gone from trying to bribe Sloane into leaving Kath’s house to successfully bribing him to stay. He has hired Sloane as his chauffeur, arranged for a proper leather uniform, and volunteered to pay Sloane’s lodging expenses. If Ed has manipulated Sloane into fulfilling Ed’s desires, or at least learning how to fake it well, Sloane has no less managed to have Ed meet all of his economic needs and allow him sexual access to Kath (at the low price of having to disavow that he wants her) while Sloane retains the trump card: he does not have to submit to Ed sexually; he merely has to embody Ed’s sexual and moral desires. This is not to say that Sloane objects to being desired by Ed, nor that he has any profound distaste for sex with him or homosexual sex generally. Rather, in terms of negotiation, Sloane is able to withhold something that he may grant at a later time: he can string Ed along with deferred gratification for as long as he can get away with it. The triangular relationship between Sloane, Ed, and Kath is a fairly accessible structure of desire and imposed identification. The fourth character, Kemp, fits in with a great deal more difficulty, which helps to explain why it is his death that brings the play to its crisis point, but also allows its resolution. Kemp is father to both Kath and Ed, yet both of them infantilize Kemp. Kath, for instance, claims when Kemp first appears on stage that he “behave[s] like a sick child” (69). Ed, frustrated with his father’s refusal to sign papers that presumably would allow his children to place him in a nursing home, refers to Kemp’s “silly, childish ways” (80). Finally, Kath sums up her view of him with “without a word of a lie you are like a little child” (92). Part of the difficulties between Kemp and Sloane, then, lies in their competition for the same role. Kemp has functioned as Kath’s son as much as her father. She takes care of him, monitors his eating, and condescends to him in a stereotypically maternal way. Ed’s relationship is more difficult in that Kemp hasn’t spoken to him in some twenty years. Nevertheless, Ed has a sentimental position for his father in his mental construct of family life, and when Kemp finally does speak to him, he opens the identity marked “father” and lets his constructions flow:

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“Pat me on the head. Pronounce a blessing. Forgive and forget, eh? I’m sorry and so are you” (115). Yet within two lines Ed shows a clear preference for Sloane over Kemp. kemp. Tell him [Sloane] to go. ed. Dad, what manners you got. How rude you’ve become. (115)

For both Kath and Ed, Kemp runs a distant second to Sloane as a family member. Kemp may be able to play both father and son to Kath, but he cannot replace her son while also replacing the son’s father. Likewise, Ed is more than willing to play the part of son to Kemp, but Kemp cannot fulfill the simultaneous roles of mate and symbolic child that Sloane can so readily do for Ed. The fact that Kemp is literally Kath and Ed’s father is made twice ironic, in that both Kath and Ed treat Kemp as a child, and that both Kath and Ed come to prefer Sloane to, as they would put it, their own flesh and blood. An added irony occurs when we realize the nature of the complaints for which Kemp has broken his twenty-year silence in the exchange cited above. Kemp’s initial distaste for Sloane seems based primarily on emotional jealousy. As he says to Kath, “he may take you away” (92), a statement that turns out to be oddly prescient. It is, in fact, Kemp who will be taken away by Sloane, but Kemp’s recognition that a competition for position within the family structure has just begun is accurate. This is a game that Kemp cannot hope to win for he lacks the resources to outbid Sloane for the affections of Kath and Ed. All he has is literal family relations and a healthy stock of guilt for his children’s failure adequately to acknowledge his paternal role. In Orton’s world, this is not nearly enough. In many ways, Sloane will replace Kemp in the family structure, and he will do so not by simply fulfilling Kemp’s former role, but rather by allowing Kemp’s children to fulfill more of their own desires through Sloane than they could ever hope to through Kemp. Moreover, Sloane wins by combining more apparently incompatible desires into one package than Kemp can manage. While Kemp can pull off the improbable combination of father and child, only Sloane can combine child and lover, and the latter combination proves much more satisfying to both Kath and Ed. When it comes to it, each will be more than willing to trade Kemp for Sloane. Another reason that Ed, at least, is willing to use Kemp’s death as an opportunity to solidify his grasp on Sloane lies in Kemp’s reason for the twenty years of silence between them. During Kemp and Sloane’s first exchange, Kemp makes a revelation about his son:

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kemp. He was a good boy. Played some amazing games as a youth. Won every goal at football one season. Sport mad, he was. (Pause.) Then one day, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, I had cause to return home unexpected and found him committing some kind of felony in the bedroom. sloane. Is that straight? kemp. I could never forgive him. sloane. A puritan, are you? kemp. Yes.

Ed has yet to appear on stage at this point, so Kemp’s speech serves to set up Ed’s fascination with sports; it may also provide a hint to Sloane as to how best to tease Ed’s desires so soon after first meeting him. But it also reveals the essential point of Ed and Kemp’s relationship. Kemp’s selfidentification as a puritan marks him as different from every other character on the stage. Like McLeavy, the father figure in Loot, Kemp is the only character not blessed with the redeeming Ortonesque quality of hypocrisy. Kath, Ed, and Sloane are quite clear in their refusal to let their moral standards get in the way of the fulfillment of their desires. While Sloane seems never to mouth any ideals at all, Kath and Ed are fully capable of claiming principles while negotiating for what or whom they most want; all they ask is that their moral desires be granted as much credence as their sexual desires. Kemp alone lacks this ability. He is to all appearances a true believer who has really condemned his son for whatever furtive occurrences went on behind the door from which Kemp had removed the lock. His moral inflexibility removes him from the possibility of negotiation, and negotiation of desire is the primary onstage activity in Mr. Sloane. In claiming puritanism, Kemp not only refuses to play the game, he refuses to acknowledge the game’s existence. He ignores his son for as long as he can – only when Kemp becomes a barrier to Sloane’s desire to maintain as effortless and comfortable a life as possible does Kemp re-enter the game and speak to Ed again. The idea that Kemp represents a threat to Sloane’s continued life of ease allows their relationship’s position in the family romance to come into sharper focus. This tension suffuses their initial meeting, wherein Sloane begins subtly to threaten Kemp by insisting that he has seen Kemp somewhere before. Kemp denies this, yet within a few minutes the situation is precisely reversed. After discussing Kemp’s puritanism and the murder two years earlier of Kemp’s employer, it is Kemp who begins to insist that he has seen Sloane before while Sloane adamantly denies it. Their discussion ends with Sloane calling Kemp a “superannuated old prat” (74), after which Kemp stabs him in the leg with a toasting fork. The tables have been turned

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by the shared suspicion that Kemp knows that Sloane is the murderer of his employer and that he might be able to identify Sloane to the police. The Sloane-Kemp relationship, then, is a competition over who gets to threaten whom: does the old man threaten the young with exposure or the young threaten the old with violence? Both scenarios occur, but the struggle is over which is to be the more effective. Obviously, the Sloane-Kemp relationship is much less sexual than that between Sloane and the other characters. Yet the intimacy and physicality in which Sloane’s threats manifest themselves share much of the specifically sexual appeal that he has for Ed and Kath. Sloane’s threatening of Kemp, in other words, is the dark side of his ability to morph himself to fit the desires of others. If Sloane has nothing that Kemp wants, then he is able to use his chameleonic sensitivity to become what Kemp fears. This fear then transforms itself into a negative version of desire: Kemp wants Sloane to go away, though eventually it is Sloane who will make Kemp go away. Sloane appears in Kemp’s bedroom at night and physically assaults him, a situation somewhere between a parody and a mere variation on a theme of what he does in similar surroundings with Kath and what Ed would very much like to do with Sloane. Sloane realizes that he has a role to play with Kemp that is every bit as useful and overdetermined as his roles with Ed and Kath. He is the embodiment of Kemp’s generational fears: his fear of the unpredictability and potential violence of youth, both in the rather obvious sense of midsixties fears of youth culture13 and in the more specific fears that Kemp’s own children will renounce their sense of filial duty and cast him off into a nursing home. Kemp thus reads Sloane and his incipient alliances with both of his children as betrayals of his paternal status. Kath and Ed want to trade in the father for a combination child and lover. Kemp fears, quite correctly, that he cannot win such a battle. This generational betrayal plays out not only in Kemp’s fear and resentment of Sloane, but in Sloane’s seemingly motiveless hatred of Kemp. When Sloane attempts to justify himself to Kemp by simultaneously confessing to the murder of Kemp’s employer and claiming it as an accident, Sloane’s language testifies to the way in which he feels himself to have been betrayed by men in the class of fathers. As he tells it in Act Two, it is on his way back from his parents’ grave that he is given a ride by Kemp’s employer, a man established in Act One as a pillar of the community. Sloane describes how the man had taken him home, given him a meal and a bath, and then shown him samples of his photographic work in the form of “one or two experimental studies” (125). Sloane’s prose in the scene is at once evasive and effusive, but his meaning is deftly communicated to the audience, if not to

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Kemp. These “experimental studies,” which are “an experience for the retina and no mistake” are parts of the employer’s pornography collection, and the employer wants Sloane to model for him: “He wanted to photo me. For certain interesting features I had that he wanted the exclusive right of preserving” (125). Sloane obliges, yet in the middle of the night he regrets his decision and goes searching through the photographer’s equipment in order to destroy the negatives. The photographer catches him, and Sloane loses his head “which is a thing I ought never to a done” (125), hits, and kills the middle-aged man. The generational betrayal here is not merely personal. There may be a trace of resentment in Sloane’s having to trade sex for food and shelter or, to put it another way, being forced to recognize that an offer of charity disguises a negotiation for gratified desire. After all, such negotiations are the story of the play, and the speech gives the audience an important insight into Sloane’s experiences. His negotiations with Kath and Ed do not represent a loss of innocence for him: he has been down this road before and knows it well.14 If there is a betrayal here, it comes not so much from sexual desire disguised as altruism, but from the sudden appearance of an economic basis that underlies all these onstage negotiations. Sloane’s speech does not begin with thumbing a ride, or even with his visit to his parents’ grave. It begins with his description of a job he has been given in order to get him out of his orphanage. They’d found me a likeable permanent situation. Canteen facilities. Fortnight’s paid holiday. Overtime? Time and a half after midnight. A staff dance every year. What more could one wish to devote one’s life to? (124)

Sloane makes no attempt at a logical connection between this introduction and the narrative of travel, implied sex, and murder that follows it. It remains, then, for the audience to make such a connection or, in other words, to determine how the story that culminates in the murder of the pornographer functions as an answer to the deceptively phrased, apparently rhetorical question: “what more could one wish to devote one’s life to?” Sloane’s characterization of the job participates in the same stylized overstatement that dominates the rest of this speech (at almost a full page, it is by far the longest speech of the play). “What more could one wish to devote one’s life to” is a product of the same prose style that gives us “an experience for the retina and no mistake” as a description of the photographer’s pornographic work. At once euphemistic and overstated, it is the voice of the youthful British underclass venting its disappointment, using verbiage to both disguise the paltriness of the offerings of the postwar economy and

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to parody the language with which the establishment papers over this lack of opportunity. “An experience for the retina and no mistake” avoids any hint of a graphic description of what Sloane sees in the pornographer’s private chambers, yet the overemphasis of the phrase leaves no doubt as to the content of the pictures. In the same way, “what more could one wish to devote one’s life to,” especially when followed by “the air round Twickenham was like wine” (124), communicates dissatisfaction while claiming contentment. Clearly the powers that arranged Sloane’s employment thought the amenities listed in his speech represented as much as any young man with Sloane’s background should be allowed to hope for. Sloane’s attitude comprehends their condescension and hates them for it. In this context the connection between Sloane’s ressentiment and the murder becomes a bit clearer. Sloane’s treatment by the photographer is another instance of those who claim to want to take care of him actually wanting to exploit him. Having established that, however, I should clarify that it is not necessary to doubt Sloane’s story that he killed the older man through momentary anger rather than malice aforethought. As stated above, the Sloane we see on stage is a person well adapted to his environment of sexual negotiation. He knows what the game is, and even his moments of apparent naïveté are parts of his strategy. He doesn’t kill the photographer because the latter negotiated with him for sex; rather, he kills because his anger, a product of his resentment of those who have power over him, gets the best of him. The Sloane we see on stage has learned from this experience. The photographer has been split into Ed and Kemp. Sloane is teasing Ed for as long as he can, trying to raise his own worth for the benefit of Ed’s silent bidding. Sloane’s resentful violence toward the old is limited in its targeting to Kemp because Kemp is powerless. Sloane will not bite the hand that feeds him, only the hand that both competes for his food and represents those who said they would feed him but failed to do so. The relationship between Sloane and Kemp, then, is one that replicates the more apparent negotiations of desire between Sloane and the other characters, but does so in a negative way: Sloane learns how to be Kemp’s nightmare as quickly as he learns to be Kath and Ed’s dream. It becomes obvious that Sloane can fulfill more of Kath and Ed’s desires than Kemp can ever hope to. And Kemp also allows Sloane to focus his resentment of men in the class of fathers on Kemp rather than Ed. Sloane’s resentment of the economic basis from which he must negotiate, which is to say, from which he must barter sex for food, shelter, and money, almost disappears. Almost, but not completely: Sloane slips, if we can call it that, early in Act One while he is negotiating with Kath and, in fact, immediately after she

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has first kissed him. Kath is well on in the process of letting Sloane know the precise combination of child and husband that she expects him to fulfill, and Sloane, primarily in his utterance of “I need . . . understanding” (68, ellipsis in original), lets her know his willingness to be her son and lover. In the midst of these negotiations, just as Kath is outlining her requirements, Sloane breaks the mood: kath (kisses his cheek). Just a motherly kiss. A real mother’s kiss. (Silence. Lifts his arms and folds them about her.) You’ll find me very sentimental. I upset easy. (His arms are holding her.) When I hear of . . . tragedies happening to perfect strangers. There are so many ruined lives. (Puts her head on his shoulder.) You must treat me gently when I’m in one of my moods. Silence. sloane (clearing his throat). How much are you charging? I mean – I’ve got to know. He drops his arms. She moves away. (68–69, ellipsis in original)

There are two ways to read this interruption, though they are ultimately compatible. Sloane may be acknowledging the economics of desire that underlies this conversation and, indeed, the entire play. If so, he is letting slip that he understands that Kath and he are bartering in emotional needs. He is asking, then, for a limitation to the bidding: how much is he going to have to offer in exchange for room and board? But there is also the possibility to interpret the statement a bit more literally. It is, of course, a perfectly literal statement, though one that is never answered. Ed eventually decides to cover Sloane’s living expenses, though the audience is never given a precise monetary amount. Sloane’s abrupt inquiry, however, can serve to introduce the ground of material economics to this negotiation of emotional exchange. By mentioning money, he tacitly recognizes that the currency of this exchange is of two kinds. In a sense, he is demonstrating his understanding that Kath is asking him for a virtuosic emotional performance of several roles at once. If this is what she wants, she will need to pay for it: not in kind, but in coin. The same will be true for Ed, though that relationship hardly needs a reminder of its material basis. If we allow this admission of material desire into a discussion that has been dominated up to this point by psychological desire, we admit yet another set of roles for the characters to negotiate. Not only does Kath want to be Sloane’s mother and lover, she wants to be his landlady; not only does Ed want to be Sloane’s mate and lover, he wants to be his employer. Sloane must be part of the family romance and part of the economic exchange: son, mate, lover, threat, lodger, employee. Kath and Ed will then compete over the question of which role takes precedence. In Act Two Ed attempts to pull

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rank by refusing to allow Kath the liberty of calling Sloane “boy,” a right Ed reserves for himself because “I’m his employer, see. He knows that you’re only his landlady” (109). These material concerns threaten to pull Orton’s parodic little household apart. So long as Ed claims an exclusive ownership of Sloane, a contention that Sloane cannot possibly fulfill all of Ed’s needs if he’s going to fulfill any of Kath’s, the arrangement operates as a zero-sum game in which the winner takes all. Act Three will present a compromise. The compromise involves a sacrifice of the puritanical father and a redefinition of the sexuality of object choice. Once Kemp is gotten out of the way, the responsibility for his death becomes the grounds for a new round of negotiations, this time between Ed and Kath. Sloane is distributed in this exchange, not consulted. Ed and Kath implicitly realize that their claims are not exclusive: Sloane need not be all Kath’s or all Ed’s. He can be shared and thus become the object of homosexual and heterosexual desire. This is possible, however, only when Sloane loses his own powers of negotiation and is reduced to the same kind of helplessness as Kemp, whom he has murdered. The sexual exclusivity in which Ed believes and from which he must be weaned plays out in his pronounced misogyny. He blames Kath for the destruction of the relationship with his mate, the father of Kath’s baby. He warns Sloane off Kath, and women in general, through his story. He characterizes the homosexual relationship as “innocent [. . .] until she came on the scene [. . .] Nothing was the same after” (114). Having lost, as he sees it, one mate to Kath already, he is not about to lose another. Having set up this parallel between Kath’s former lover, who is also Ed’s former mate, and Sloane, Orton then presses it home with the revelation that Sloane has, just like his predecessor, impregnated Kath. When Ed learns of the situation, he immediately condemns Sloane, but he is easily manipulated into forgiving him because Sloane understands precisely what Ed needs him to be: “You got it, Ed. Know me better than I know myself ” (120). This confrontation leads to two of the most pronounced double entendres of the play. Immediately after Sloane’s just cited statement, Ed proclaims: “Your youth pleads for leniency and, by God, I’m going to give it. You’re pure as the Lamb. Purer” (120). A few lines later, after advising Sloane once again to give up women entirely, Ed says, “with me behind you, boy, you’ll grow out of it” (121). More than simply providing laugh lines (one hopes) for the audience, both statements reveal the misogyny of Ed’s sexual preferences. Given his previous characterization of his relationship

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with his mate as “innocent,” his biblical proclamation of Sloane’s purity continues the association of women with sin and men, and consequently homosexual object choice, with cleanliness. His “leniency” is thus not just a code for sexual desire, but conflation of it with moral purity. This is a theme to which we shall need to return momentarily. The second statement, besides the rather obvious playing with sexual positions, also constructs heterosexual object choice as a stage through which a young man like Sloane might have to pass to get to where he needs to be (which is clearly in front of Ed). In both cases, Ed is demanding exclusivity: his negotiations with Sloane have as a precondition the exclusion of Kath and all other women. Sloane’s murder of Kemp, naturally enough, brings the conflict to a crisis point. Having treated Kemp much as he treated the photographer, Sloane panics and suggests a cover-up: Ed and Kath must fake evidence of an accident and lie to the police. This is, of course, precisely what will happen in the remainder of the play, but both Ed and Kath will first need to display a proper reluctance, as well as the requisite indignation of the morally offended bourgeoisie. The function of these protestations will ultimately be to remind Sloane of the necessity of negotiation. Having lost his advantage by putting himself potentially at the mercy of the authorities, Sloane has handed his fate over to Ed and Kath. He needs to be made first to realize this and then to negotiate from his new position of weakness. Confronted with the specter of a murder conviction, Sloane instinctively abandons the pretenses of respectability and demands that Ed cover for him. When Ed objects on principle, Sloane blusters “You’ve got no principles” (134), to which Ed replies: No principles? Oh, you really have upset me now. Why am I interested in your welfare? Why did I give you a job? Why do thinking men everywhere show young boys the strait and narrow? Flash cheque-books when delinquency is mentioned? Support the Scout-movement? Principles, boy, bleeding principles. And don’t you dare say otherwise or you’ll land in serious trouble. (134)

Again, there is in this speech the kind of double entendre that it feels ridiculous to point out; in this case philanthropy for youth either masquerades or is sublimated as a taste for rough trade. But there is more at stake here than merely Ed’s self-deception. Standing on principle represents not so much an exception to the patterns of negotiation seen in the play as an extension of them, for one of the qualities constantly being bargained for on stage is the quality of appearing respectable. Sloane must thus intuit not

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only Ed and Kath’s sexual desire for him, but also their balancing desire not to have to (or need to) admit it.15 Again, the image of Kath’s see-through negligee is helpful here: desire may well be transparent in Mr. Sloane, but it can never be allowed to be naked. Thus when Sloane finally capitulates sexually to Ed, he must not only do so under such veiled terms as expertise “on the adolescent male body” (135), he must also accompany his surrender with a withdrawal of physical signs; Ed demands that Sloane remove his hand from Ed’s leg where he has placed it during his confession. It is not so much that sexual desire is the “real” motivation behind all negotiation in the play; rather, it is one of several desires in constant circulation and trade, respectability being of approximately equal importance. The end of the play is a triumph of negotiation with the difference that, rather than the previously dominant situation in which all the other characters have to negotiate with Sloane, Sloane is excluded and it is Ed and Kath who get to negotiate with each other. In this exchange Ed is forced to give up his sexual exclusivity, not only in that he will now share Sloane with Kath, but that he will have to relinquish his demand that Sloane avoid women altogether. Once Kath and Ed mutually agree to turn Sloane into a sexual time-share, the implications of Orton’s sexual politics become crystallized. Sloane fits into both Ed and Kath’s sense of a household, and his roles as brother16 and lover to Ed no longer compromise his roles as son and lover to Kath. So long as people are willing to negotiate their exclusivity, all other aspects of desire can much more easily be accommodated. It’s both a timely and a prescient vision of the celebrated promiscuity of the mid sixties and after, and it shows that such negotiations will take place, not so much in a spirit of Lawrentian free love and celebration of the loosening of the repressive social bonds that have restricted the chthonic powers of the sexual, but instead in a social space wherein the values of bourgeois propriety are themselves part of the negotiation. The vision here differs from that of the “quite unlosable game”17 of Philip Larkin’s “Annus Mirabilis”; rather than a free-for-all, in other words, Orton offers a newly widened space in which to reopen negotiations. To extend the Larkin comparison for a moment and to move us toward what I see as the most salient difference between the play and the movie, Orton’s vision completely rejects the cessation of what Larkin calls “bargaining,” but it does agree with Larkin that the “wrangle for the ring” is over. The end of the play explicitly rejects marriage as either a solution in itself or as a necessary condition of negotiating a solution, while the end of the film contains one of the earliest representations of gay marriage in cinema.

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Sloane on screen: the dream of gay marriage The film version of Entertaining Mr. Sloane was released in 1970, six years after the play’s premier and three years after Orton’s death. Douglas Hickox directed from Clive Exton’s screenplay. Generally speaking, it sticks to Orton’s text fairly tightly with the exception of the very end of the play. Otherwise, the major changes lie in the setting: rather than a house overlooking a dump, as Orton has it, Kath’s house in the film is attached to the cemetery in which Sloane’s parents are buried. Although there is no mention of any specifically ecclesiastical role for the family, the house looks like a church, complete with stained-glass windows, candles, and an organ (on which Ed plays a hymn while negotiating with Kath near the end of the film).18 When combined with the opening shots of graveyard crosses and a close-up of the cross that Kath wears on a necklace, the film seems to make specifically Christian hypocrisy its main target. Sloane, who wears a phallic horn on his necklace, thus seems like a pagan eruption into the staid Christian repression of the Kemp household; this is certainly a valid, but by no means inevitable, interpretation of the play. Another visual interpretation is represented in Ed’s car, a hot-pink Pontiac Parisienne convertible complete with an added hood ornament of a naked young man. Though Ed himself remains Orton’s repressed misogynist, his car seems to communicate a confessional effeminacy completely foreign to the character. Apparently, either Hickox wanted the car to say things about Ed he is himself quite unwilling to say, or Hickox felt that Ed needs to be visually marked as stereotypically homosexual precisely because the character’s behavior refuses to embody the stereotype. As previously mentioned, the most significant changes between the play and the film occur at the end, after Ed and Kath have agreed on their division of Sloane. In Orton’s play marriage is rejected outright. Ed asks Kath, “I take it there’s no question of making an honest woman of you? You don’t demand the supreme sacrifice?” (147). Kath never insists on marriage: the contract between Ed and herself seems all the guarantee that’s necessary (“I don’t mind about marriage as long as he doesn’t leave me” [148]). More telling still, however, is Ed’s rejection of anything analogous to matrimony. As Sloane takes his final exit from the stage, leaving Ed and Kath to work out the details of his fate, he expresses his gratitude to Ed for not turning him in to the police: sloane. I’ll be grateful. ed. Will you?

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sloane. Eternally. ed. Not eternally, boy. Just a few years. (He pats sloane on the shoulder. sloane exits.) (148)

Ed is sufficiently familiar with his own sexual tastes to know that what he wants from Sloane is his youth. Once that youth is gone, it will be time for Ed to move on to another relationship. Though Sloane seems the answer to all Ed’s desires now, there is no question of a “till death us do part.” And this is the final part of Ed’s negotiation with Sloane, in that Ed is simultaneously letting Sloane off with a temporary sentence and letting him know that in a few years his services will no longer be required. Kath’s relinquishing of any legal basis for her negotiated claim to Sloane has similar implications, though they are not hinted at in the way that Ed’s are. It is possible that when her child is older, Kath may no longer feel the need for Sloane’s company; on the other hand, she may want him fulltime once Ed is done with him. She is keeping her options open. The meaning of Kath’s options can be garnered from a close look at her final negotiations in the movie. Here, Kath insists, not on a legal marriage, but on the observation of the form, the ritual. She convinces Ed that he has the power to perform the ceremony because, although he was never the captain of a ship, he was in the Navy. So she pries the Book of Common Prayer out of the hands of her father’s corpse, produces a bouquet of flowers, and has Ed preside over a truncated, semi-parodic wedding ceremony. Beryl Reid’s performance signals that Kath is living out a dream, the happy day she should have had with the father of her first baby, and even if she has to do it over the battered body of Kemp, she is going to get what has been denied her so long. She relishes the “I will” and resolutely ignores Sloane’s squirming and other signs of obvious reluctance. In addition to reinforcing the film’s more specifically anti-religious slant, the film Kath is more of a sentimentalist than Orton’s version. The film Kath wants the trappings of bridehood, no matter how compromised and non-binding. She willingly substitutes her compensatory fantasy for any further negotiation over Sloane. Orton’s Kath, conversely, looks far more clear-eyed in comparison: she knows that the form is easily sacrificed if she retains the thing itself – or at least retains it on a half-time basis. The film goes further, however. Having now ritualized her claim to Sloane, Kath suggests that Ed do the same. What follows, after Sloane’s stifled objection, is an early representation of gay marriage and, as one might expect for 1970, it is a strangely marked one. Kath presides over the ceremony and recites the vows for Ed’s response while Sloane holds the

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bouquet and never utters a word. Sloane is clearly playing the feminine role in this scenario, and his response is less the fidgety resentment of his wedding to Kath than it is a kind of shocked silence, as if he can’t believe that this is really happening. Ed takes it seriously enough, though, and the film ends with a freeze-frame close-up of Kath and Ed simultaneously kissing, as it were, the bride. There is a sense in which the marriage to Ed is twice parodic. The film points out that the marriage between Kath and Sloane is not meant to be legally binding and, to that extent, constitutes a parody of a “real” marriage. Following so quickly on the heels of that ceremony, the marriage of Ed and Sloane can thus be interpreted as a parody of a parody. Unlike every other scene in the film, Hickox chooses to use special effects in the soundtrack. Where the wedding of Kath and Sloane is partnered with the expected sounds of a church organ playing Wagner’s bridal chorus, the music for the wedding of Ed and Sloane is the same tune played on a celesta with a somewhat incongruous jazz bass accompaniment. The voices of the actors (almost exclusively Kath at this point) are drenched in echo, marking the scene as differentiated from the remainder of the film. The effect is not unlike that stereotypically used for dream sequences. When Ed pronounces his “I will,” the music stops and the soundtrack is punctuated by a plucked bass portamento, which produces a decidedly comic effect. Both Ed and Kath then kiss Sloane, and the soundtrack recapitulates a phrase from Georgie Fame’s pop jazz song that features earlier in the film, and then morphs back into a church-organ resolution as the word “Amen” is superimposed on the final freeze-frame shot. The entire scene, then, seems designed, especially from the acoustic angle, to play as farce. Specifically, gay marriage here functions as a parody of Christian ritual, something that the film consistently mocks at every opportunity. More generally, the scene illustrates the hypocrisy of characters who are willing to bend social forms into whatever strange shapes they seem to require to meet their needs, all while remaining willfully blind to the illegitimacy of what they are doing. If this is so, then Ed’s marriage vow to forsake all but Sloane “as long as ye both shall live” need not contradict the refusal of eternity in Orton’s play. Insofar as the gay marriage is a fantasy, a doubly parodic sham, there is no need to take it seriously.19 It is a form gone through for form’s sake or, in terms of the film, Ed’s concession to Kath’s desire to have their contract to share Sloane formalized on both sides. Ed may, then, be refusing eternal desire in the film just as much as in the play, only less directly. The film marks the gay marriage as a dream because it is precisely that: a fulfillment of desire that remains impossible outside the private realm of the three

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characters involved. There is no danger, in 1970, that anyone will mistake the marriage of two men as a serious proposition and, if anyone should try, the film does everything in its power to convince them of the folly of their vision. Viewing the film more than thirty years after its release, however, gives an entirely different valance to the closing scene. Gay marriage is no longer a surreal proposition; rather, along with military service, it is the most conspicuous institutional area in which same-sex desire has made itself felt in western culture since 1970. To put it another way, in 1970 same-sex marriage was queer; in 2013 it is widely seen as legitimizing.20 This cultural and chronological difference can help to discern what is at stake in the two different endings offered by the play and the film. Orton’s play insists on queerness. The sexual sharing that ends the play is perverse according to just about any social standards available to mainstream culture in 1964, and the bourgeois trappings that surround this not-quite ménage à trois paradoxically call attention to the queer core of what their normality encapsulates. The written contract (alluded to, but never actually produced) and the frank treatment of Sloane and his sexual function as a commodity to be distributed between Ed and Kath make the pill of polyamorous sharing and overlapping object choice easier for the characters to swallow, but for the audience tend toward the opposite effect. The spectacle of “respectable” people self-righteously maintaining their respectability as they parlay their father’s murder into the near-incestuous mutual satisfaction of their sexual desires is the shock that Orton wants to deliver. And one can easily imagine him in the back of the theatre, watching his audience writhe with discomfort, just as in the stacks of the public libraries of Islington and Hampstead. The only way to avoid being the butt of Orton’s joke is to accept the queer as queer: people want what they want, and they bend convention to suit their desires. It is not the desire itself that’s perverse, but the necessity of drawing the see-through nightie of convention over their naked desires. The film, on the other hand, makes a move toward turning the queer into the normal. Thirty years on, bigamy rather than homosexuality queers the final scene. The use of audio effects to distance the audience from considering gay marriage as a potential reality now seems quaint. The idea that same-sex marriage needs to be consigned to a fantasy realm and kept behind the closed doors of the private sphere – remain closeted, in a word – now seems, at least to most audiences at all receptive to Orton as a dramatist, decidedly retrograde.21 What is still potentially queer, however, is the quick movement, not only from partner to partner, but from heterosexual to homosexual object. In this instance, one can’t call it “object choice” in that

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Sloane is offered very little choice: it’s either bisexual bigamy or prison pending execution for him. A variety of object choice, and of the use of established social forms to legitimize this variety, has become almost normal, and certainly not dreamlike anymore. The use of social forms to legitimize polyamory, on the other hand, is still queer. In both the play and the film it is the sexual sharing rather than the equal treatment accorded to homosexuality that is shocking. The film’s use of the marriage ceremony to legitimate both relationships can be seen as either cushioning or magnifying the blow. If marriage is something the characters need to further fool themselves that they are maintaining respectability while fulfilling their desires, the use of marriage lessens the impact of their negotiations. If, however, marriage is read as itself critiqued by the ending of the film, it can be seen as being remade into a social institution with much broader application than it has historically been granted. Ironically, then, the more seriously the audience takes marriage as a social form, the more queerly it will see the end of the film. Whether it ends in marriages or with a temporary contract for sexual division, Entertaining Mr. Sloane can still represent a challenge to audiences. It demands that an audience laugh at itself as it laughs at characters that use the forms of bourgeois normality to cover over the social negotiations necessary to meet the queerest of desires. It encourages the audience to revise normative sexual desires, such as childbearing and domestic companionship, as no less queer than homosexual rough trade. Though the representation of homosexuality on either stage or screen is no longer remarkable, Mr. Sloane can still call attention to what remains queer when variety in object choice is normalized. In doing so, it keeps the audience looking back over our shoulder, looking for a ghostly figure in the book stacks and suspecting that he’s still laughing at us, even when we’re laughing at ourselves – or worse yet, when we’re feeling complacent about how far we’ve come since 1964. Notes 1. For reproductions of the altered book forms, see John Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (New York: Knopf, 1978) and John Lahr (ed.), The Orton Diaries (New York: Harper, 1986). Online versions are available at www. joeorton.org/Pages/Joe_Orton_Gallery13.html. The original books are now, ironically enough, housed at the Islington Local History Centre. 2. Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: 82. 3. See the Diaries, ed. Lahr: 269–287 for the Welthorpe, and other pseudonymous letters.

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4. Entertaining Mr. Sloane was produced while the censorship of plays was still under the auspices of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, a practice not repealed until 1968. Orton was delighted that the censor paid attention exclusively to the heterosexual pairing and language and seemed entirely oblivious to Ed’s onstage desires; see Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: 159. 5. Randall S. Nakayama, “Domesticating Mr. Orton,” Theatre Journal, 45 (1993): 185–195. For other reactions to Lahr’s “ownership” of Orton, see David Van Leer, “Saint Joe: Orton as Homosexual Rebel,” in Joe Orton: A Casebook, ed. Francesca Coppa (New York: Routledge, 2003): 109–139 and Simon Shepherd’s Because We’re Queers: The Life and Crimes of Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1989), especially the damning final chapter, “Cottage Industries.” The difficulties and inevitabilities of biographical reading for Orton are outlined in Coppa’s introduction to Joe Orton: A Casebook: 1–10. 6. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford University Press, 1991): 317. 7. Alan Sinfield explicitly rejects Dollimore’s interpretation, seeing Orton as a much more conservative playwright in Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999): 282. My point is that Mr. Sloane, though much more realist in form, potentially shares whatever anarchic potential the reader might grant to What the Butler Saw. 8. This connection was reinforced in the 1975 London revival of the play, in which Malcolm McDowell played Sloane. 9. Other accounts of the play include C. W. E. Bigsby’s vision of Orton as avant-garde playwright in Joe Orton (London: Methuen, 1982), Arthur Burke’s foregrounding of Ed as an innovative style of stage homosexual in Laughter in the Dark: The Plays of Joe Orton (London: Greenwich Exchange, 2001), Maurice Charney’s emphasis on linguistic usage in Joe Orton (London: Macmillan, 1984), and Susan Rusinko’s stress on Orton’s adaptations of Pinter’s technique in Joe Orton (New York: Twayne, 1995). 10. Joe Orton, The Complete Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1976): 68; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 11. This failure of Sloane explicitly to turn out to be Kath’s long-lost son is one of the reasons D. S. Lawson reads Mr. Sloane as a self-conscious frustration of the well-made play. D. S. Lawson, “The Creation of Comedy in Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr. Sloane,” in Joe Orton: A Casebook, ed. Coppa: 17. 12. Such an assumption seems to me to underlie Michelene Wandor’s contention that Kath is guilty of “confusing her maternal and sexual needs” in Look Back in Gender: Sexuality and the Family in Post-War British Drama (London: Methuen, 1987): 55. 13. Entertaining Mr. Sloane was first performed in May of 1964, precisely the same time as the highly publicized Mods and Rockers riots in Brighton and other seaside resort towns. 14. Orton spelled out to the director of the first American production that “Sloane knows Eddie wants him. He has absolutely no qualms about surrendering his

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body. None. He’s done it many, many times.” Cited in Lahr, Prick Up Your Ears: 148. 15. Kath likewise gets her scene of standing on principle when she refuses to perjure herself in covering up Kemp’s murder after Ed appears to have triumphed and is taking Sloane away for himself (144–145). 16. Ed’s mate is, of course, not literally his brother, but he constructs the relationship as a close and familial one. This symbolic sibling relationship connects Mr. Sloane to Orton’s first play, The Ruffian on the Stair, wherein Wilson is presented as the homosexual lover of his own brother. 17. Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989): 167. “Annus Mirabilis” originally appeared in Larkin’s 1974 collection High Windows; Thwaite dates the poem to 1967. 18. The graveyard scenes were shot in the Camberwell Old Cemetery in London; the exterior of the house may well be the chapel for that cemetery. 19. One might also say that both marriages function as illustrations of an infelicitous attempt at one of J. L. Austin’s performative speech acts. The second ceremony is doubly infelicitous as it lacks both the proper authority of the speaker (the one who pronounces the couple lawfully wedded) and the proper conditions for the speech (the “wrong” sex of one of the couple). See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975): especially 12–24. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reflections on Austin’s use of the marriage ceremony as “the founding example of the explicit performative” can be found in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003): 70. 20. For an objection to the use of mainstream forms of cultural legitimation in addressing same-sex issues, see Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The terms of my argument about the final scene are indebted to Warner’s thesis. 21. The film’s marriage scene may also be construed as the end of a tradition as well as the beginning of one, specifically the practice of enacting mock marriages in the molly houses (male brothels) of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London. See, among many other sources, Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993): 111–113, and Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005): 14.

chapter 9

Sleuth on screen: adapting masculinities Monika Pietrzak-Franger

“andrew. Let me tell you, Inspector. I have played games of such complexity that Jung and Einstein would have been honoured to have been asked to participate in them. Games of construction and games of destruction. Games of hazard, and games of callidity. Games of deductive logic, inductive logic, semantics, colour association, mathematics, hypnosis and prestidigitation. I have achieved leaps of the mind and leaps of the psyche unknown in ordinary human relationships. And I’ve had a great deal of not wholly innocent fun.”1 “andrew. We know what it is to play a game, you and I. That’s so rare, two people brought together, equally matched, having the courage and the talents to make of life a continuing charade of bright fancy, happy invention, to face out its emptiness and its terrors by playing, by just playing.”2 “andrew. Obey the rules.”3

Skulduggery, game playing, and mystery solving are the obvious subjects of Anthony Shaffer’s play Sleuth (1970). They are invoked in the play and highlighted by its structure and setting. Unlike early mystery dramas, however, Sleuth also plays games with the audience by subverting its generic expectations.4 Here, masculinity and the male power struggle become the main platforms for trickery and competition. The two male protagonists engage in a game of humiliation. Andrew Wyke, an affluent, upper-class detective-story writer, invites Milo Tindle, the lover of his wife Marguerite, allegedly to help his adversary acquire enough money to maintain her standard of living. In fact, Wyke devises a plot to take revenge on the man who “stole” his wife and to settle their accounts. Andrew Wyke and Milo Tindle, who privately compete for the attentions of the same woman, at the same time particularize a broader socio-cultural struggle for supremacy fought by the representatives of traditional and new-emerging masculinities. Broadly speaking, Shaffer’s play is concerned with the negotiation of male position in the system of patriarchal kingship. 169

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9.1 Laurence Olivier as Andrew Wyke in the 1972 film version of Sleuth.

A West End and Broadway success, Shaffer’s play has been adapted to screen twice.5 The 1972 version, a cooperation of Anthony Shaffer, who wrote the screenplay, and director Joseph Mankiewicz, brought the play to cinematic audiences in a crafty and detail-loaded thriller featuring Laurence Olivier as Andrew Wyke and young Michael Caine as Milo Tindle (Illustration 9.1). Considerable changes were made to the play to underline the class conflict and to highlight the topic of game playing. The misleading cast credits at the beginning of the film, the miniature paper theatrical sets, which open and close the film, the clues concerning the identity of certain characters – all these elements show that the film is engaged in a game with the audience as well as in recounting the meeting of the two male adversaries.6 In Kenneth Branagh’s 2007 version, based on Harold Pinter’s screenplay, this game with the audience is more subtle, and the plot emphasizes the male struggle for supremacy. Residual intertextual references to Mankiewicz’s adaptation are present in the cast: Michael Caine, the embodiment of the new ascending working-class hero in the 1972 film, features as Andrew Wyke next to Jude Law, who plays contemporary Milo Tindle. While Branagh’s update leaves the intrigue and its major development unchanged, it introduces a number of modifications to the characterization of both protagonists as well as to their power struggle (Illustration 9.2). The result of these changes is a substantial transformation of portrayed masculinities. With the thirty-year time lapse and major socio-cultural as well as cinematic transformations, the depiction and performance of masculinity have also changed considerably. This chapter traces these developments with particular attention to the issues of class, ethnicity, and sexuality, which are interrelated with the question of masculinity and the fight

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9.2 Kenneth Branagh’s postmodern version of Sleuth features a multi-mediated look (here a security camera view of the two antagonists).

for hegemony. These categories will therefore be regarded as particularly tangible markers of change. As the erotic triangle between Wyke, Tindle, and Marguerite is crucial to Shaffer’s play, the male-female relationships will also be given special attention. Taking these factors into consideration, I argue that, although both film versions of Shaffer’s Sleuth offer clearly distinct masculinity types which mirror and contribute to the socio-cultural changes in Britain, they depict the precariousness of male positions by mapping out the instability of male control over certain media.

Changing masculinity scripts For at least the last thirty years, theorists from across disciplines have been arguing for the constructedness of gender identities.7 Masculinities have been increasingly defined as dynamic and plural, performative, culturally specific, and highly relational.8 Sociologists and cultural critics have been stressing the interrelatedness of masculinity paradigms with such sociocultural and economic categories as class, ethnicity, and sexuality.9 Already in the eighties, Australian sociologist R. W. Connell began to stress the historicity and multiplicity of masculinities, arguing for their diversity and hierarchical structuring as well as highlighting their dependence on macro-level power structures. Using the Gramscian notion of hegemony, Connell proposes a hierarchical model of masculinities, in which hegemonic masculinity, while not dominant in the statistical sense, “embodie[s] the currently most honored way of being a man, . . . [which] require[s] all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and . . . ideologically

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legitimate[s] the global subordination of women to men.”10 Clearly, the structuring of masculinities is fundamentally bound to micro- and macrolevel power relations. Recognizing this, sociologist Jeff Hearn contends not only that men’s dominance is “supported through economic, political, institutional and discursive structures,” but also alerts us to recognize the number of different levels of power and its uneven distribution among various masculinity paradigms.11 As the individual performance of masculinity depends on a variety of dynamic scripts dictated by socio-political and economic circumstances, it adapts with every transformation of the global and local landscapes. It is therefore not surprising that contextual modifications also transform the blueprint of masculinity in Mankiewicz’s and Branagh’s adaptations, which is reflected in the alteration of Wyke’s and Tindle’s socio-political and economic status as well as in the metamorphosis of the female / male and hetero- / homosexual relations. What these transformations bring to light, reflect, and contribute to are the shifts in general attitudes toward masculinity and adjustments in its discursive conceptualization. These modifications have often been considered as representative of a crisis of masculinity. Today, the crisis of masculinity is regarded as an ongoing phenomenon, which, as Tim Edwards aptly argues in Cultures of Masculinity (2006), often denotes an alleged, empirically unproved, and media-inflated transformation of male roles.12 In fact, Edwards dismisses such a conceptualization of crisis, arguing instead that “[t]hough there is some evidence to support the notion of demographically or geographically specific ‘crisis tendencies’ for some men, there is very little to endorse any overall masculinity in crisis thesis other than to say that masculinity is perhaps partially constituted as crisis.”13 Taking into consideration representational and discursive tendencies in art, Abigail Solomon-Godeau similarly argues that “like capitalism, masculinity is always in crisis, but like the phoenix . . . it continually rises again, retooled and reconstructed for its next historical turn.”14 With every decade witnessing a newly heralded crisis in masculinity, discourses about masculinity and its types multiply. Many scholars have predicted, announced, and analyzed the birth and demise of numerous outcroppings of men, from the late-eighties “New Man” and the nineties “New Lad,” to the post-millennium “Metrosexual,” “Emo Boy,” “New Bloke,” and the “Übersexual,” to the contemporary wave of “Kidults” – childish, emotionally vulnerable, and sensitive men who exist in counterpart to the highly medially marketed phenomenon of “Menaissance,” “[a] brave new era of manhood in which men are putting their feet down and

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reclaiming their manliness from whoever it was that thieved it from them.”15 What we seem to witness in this post-millennium flux of masculinity constructs is a predominant desire for traditional male ideals, which, paradoxically, goes hand in hand with their devolution.16 This supports Solomon-Godeau’s argument that, whatever the new discursive and representational tendencies, they are “as much an index of the resilience of patriarchy as [they are] a sign of its fragility.”17 Hence, however much masculinity scripts have changed in the 1972 and 2007 versions of Shaffer’s Sleuth, they are nonetheless inexorably related to the intricacies of male power struggles both on the individual level of male control and on a more global field of patriarchal supremacy. R. Barton Palmer aptly characterizes the struggle for dominance between Shaffer’s Andrew Wyke and Milo Tindle as the “rivalry between the old ‘England’ and new ‘United Kingdom.’”18 Likewise, in the 2007 review of Branagh’s Sleuth, the Observer critic Philip French rightly identifies the significance of the historical embedding for the play: Back in 1974, in his book Europe without Baedeker, Edmund Wilson put his finger on the play’s subject matter. “In other countries, manners are intended to diminish social friction, to show people consideration and to make them feel at ease . . . In England it is the other way: good breeding is something you exhibit by snubbing and scoring off people. This is of course clearly connected with their class system, and is partly a question of vocabulary and general style, which your inferior cannot acquire.”19

In Shaffer’s play, Wyke’s and Tindle’s personal rivalry is unmistakably evocative of the prevalent struggle between traditional, hegemonic masculinities, with their class and ethnic allegiances, and new emerging types which aspire to this status. First and foremost, this battle takes the form of a class struggle. Wyke, “an upper-crust” detective-fiction writer, a “pathetic representative of an increasingly irrelevant former ruling class,” and probably one of the last “gentlemanly types ‘formed’ on the playing fields of Eton,” leads a reclusive and affluent life in his country manor.20 With his financial situation secured by his investment in jewelry, he can satisfy every one of his wife’s whims, from Cartier jewels and Bollinger champagne to Crêpes Suzettes and a winter holiday in Jamaica, a feat that is particularly trying to Tindle, whose affair with Marguerite proves ruinous.21 Tindle, an Italian émigré’s child, and “an aspiring member of the glitzy urban set,” with few traditions to uphold,22 and a second-rate English public-school education to fall back on,23 owns a travel-agency in Dulwich, has a lease on his Georgian house,

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rents a cottage in Wyke’s vicinity, and enjoys the growing revenue from his business, but is nonetheless suffering under the cost of Marguerite’s lifestyle.24 Mankiewicz’s adaptation of Sleuth foregrounds these class inequalities. Tindle, this time a working-class rags-to-riches South-Kensington hairdresser with an immigrant background and a Cockney accent, challenges Wyke’s upper-class position. Mankiewicz justifies his choice of Tindle’s profession by pointing out the class differences that would thereby become more evident: “I preferred to make him a hairstylist, someone who had climbed the social ladder by fornicating.”25 Wyke’s derogatory remarks concerning Tindle’s apparel and his property do not allow the latter to forget his lineage and his social standing. Tindle’s occupation, as well as his verbal lapses and his apparent lack of a proper public-school education, exacerbate the differences between them. Wyke’s nonchalance in passing judgment on the welfare state and the new “classless” society is aristocratically biased, although not ignorant. While cultivating a predilection for the glorification of the national past, he is distrustful of the transformations in British society, which he regards as threatening both to his male identity and to his economic status: “Once upon a time, my dear Milo, there was an Englishman called Andrew Wyke, who, in common with his countrymen, was virtually castrated by taxation. To avoid total emasculation, the accountants advised him to put a considerable part of his money . . . into jewellery.”26 The economic status, occupational choices, and the upbringing mirror class differences between the two rivals. Despite Wyke’s constant sneers at the changes in the new welfare state, and in contrast to the real-life assurances of seventies politicians, the salience of class divisions was not undermined, either in Mankiewicz’s film or in British society. Arthur Marwick argues that “[a]lthough ‘the cultural revolution of the long 1960s’ transformed lifestyles and interpersonal relationships, challenged old conventions, and brought a new openness and honesty to ordinary discourse, it scarcely affected the fundamental class structure; rather, it exposed the realities of class more starkly than ever before.”27 Class differences influence the roles Wyke and Tindle assume and are an integral part of their masculinities; visible in their manners, accent, and sartorial style, of which the characters are clearly aware. Tindle interrupts Wyke’s tirade about their equal position in game playing by once again evoking the discrepancies between them: “Haven’t you forgotten the jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place. We are from different worlds, you and me, Andrew. In mine there was no time for bright fancies and happy inventions . . . The only game we played was to survive or go to the

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war.”28 Clearly, class is an integral, if not central, defining factor of male identities in Mankiewicz’s adaptation. In the 2007 version of Sleuth, the salience of class divisions has lost its topicality. In 2007, in a society facing the consequences of socio-economic restructuring – which began with Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s enterprise culture and continued with Tony Blair’s Neo-Liberal, CoolBritannia, shareholder society – class divisions, with their occupational and economic markers (as well as their social-networking structure) have become even less transparent.29 With these changes underway, it is not surprising that, unlike Mankiewicz’s, Branagh’s Andrew Wyke has lost all his pretensions to aristocratic background and is defined in relation to his celebrity status. No longer a gentlemanly type, sentenced to extinction by Thatcherite “profit-making” drive, and now “dead as a dodo,” Wyke seems to represent “a new phenomenon, the ‘super-rich,’ drawn from a colourful array of occupations apart from business, the media, the arts and sport.”30 He is a crime novelist, a wealthy proprietor of a designer house with an adjacent stretch of land, whose property has evidently been chosen to manifest his status. Wyke also attempts to establish his dominant position vis-à-vis Tindle by referring to the number of translations and adaptations of his novels, something that the seventies Wyke would find inappropriate. In fact, he appears to spend a considerable amount of time relishing his own popularity. During his first meeting with Tindle, Wyke not only informs the latter that he has been “watching a video of one of [his] books on television” but also displays his unique library, which resembles a religious shrine dedicated to his own celebration.31 A careful compilation and arrangement of a number of translations and adaptations of his books, together with a more than life-size portrait of Wyke, elevates him to the status of a celebrity. His prominence is spotlighted by an oversize blackand-white poster, which bears the Sunday Times’s characterization of Wyke as “the master of menace,” and which lists his book titles. By parading the interior of the room in front of Tindle, Wyke wishes to ascertain his status and daunt his adversary, an aspiring, unheard-of actor. Tindle’s ignorance as to the position of his rival makes Wyke verbally assert his supremacy through frequent references to his popularity: wyke: These are all my novels. You’ve read them, I suppose. tindle: I’m afraid not. wyke: Good God. No? What about this one: Rat in a Trap? tindle: No. wyke: The Obelisque?

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tindle: No. wyke: Blackout? Dead Fish? tindle: I’m afraid not. wyke: God. You’re one in a million. tindle: Am I? wyke: Oh absolutely. I’m very popular.32

Wyke’s self-celebration, his preoccupation with his fame and reputation, together with his penchant for adaptations and technological gimmicks, position him as a connoisseur and consumer of contemporary visual culture and virtual reality. With a propensity for the contemporary art of Antony Gormley, Ron Arad, and Gary Hume, and with a predilection for cold interiors and CCTV, he appears more a Charles Saatchi than a Ken Follett type. While entrenched in the visual culture to a far greater extent than his seventies counterpart, Tindle is clearly not a patch on Mankiewicz’s Cockney hairstylist. His provisional occupational status – he is a hairdresser-turned-actor who earns his living as a taxi driver – in no way guarantees a steady income and offers but little prospect of a prosperous future. With no real-estate investments and a car that clearly demonstrates his financial discomfiture, but with a physique that appears to compensate for all, the 2007 Tindle is more an object of attraction to the “sugar mummy” Maggie than a suitable candidate for her future husband. While the establishing shot in Mankiewicz’s film glorifies Tindle’s entrepreneurial success by featuring his triumphant drive in his red cabriolet, even if the impression is soon spoiled by the daunting grandeur of Wyke’s estate, the 2007 version highlights Tindle’s penury by depicting his small car, whose deficits become even more prominent when it is compared with Wyke’s vehicle. The transformation of the socio-economic situation of both contenders is accompanied by their modified attitude toward Englishness and national pride. In Shaffer’s play, the somewhat essentialist image of Englishness is embodied by Wyke’s manners, his education, and his lifestyle. Tindolini, Milo’s father, who immigrates to Britain in the late thirties, makes continuous attempts to adapt to his country of choice. Palmer argues that Milo Tindle’s personification of Inspector Doppler can be regarded as a skewed realization of this wish.33 Mankiewicz’s film underscores the question of nationality. Tindle stresses his father’s failed attempts to “become English,” while at the same time aping the lifestyle of the well-off upper classes with the help of his acquired accent and carefully

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chosen sartorial style.34 In this constellation, Wyke embodies the good old England of the thirties, with his gentlemanly manners and his fondness for Cole Porter and society games.35 His property bespeaks Englishness. Built in the fifteenth century and restored in 1891, Athelhampton House,36 which was used as the filming location, is a historical gem, whose interiors, loaded with numerous antiquated games, automata, books, and intertextual references (Agatha Christie’s photograph, Baker Street Signpost, RMS Mauretania life belt), symbolically and literally evoke the richness of British national heritage. Although nationality is referred to in Branagh’s film, Englishness itself seems, just as in contemporary debates, a precarious term to define. The pressure of devolution, the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, the continuing waves of migration with the constant flux of post-2004 labor force, as well as the changed political and economic allegiances, have greatly changed the face of Britain, turning it into a multicultural society. Panikos Panayi argues that despite the persisting segregation, the integration of ethnic minorities is well under way, and the proximity of their cultural traditions greatly transforms British lifestyles: from the modification of eating habits and the changes in fashion to the impact on the literary and music market.37 Although this supports Blair’s “narrative on ‘the irresistible rise of cultural Britain,’” Panayi cautions against ignoring the differences in the socio-political situatedness of minorities, arguing that “[p]erhaps Britain at the end of the twentieth century had become a multicultural racist state,” with a number of postwar immigrants who have successfully integrated in society; but, at the same time, with a plethora of minorities who have experienced economic hardship and legal discrimination.38 In the 2007 Sleuth, national allegiances are no longer clear cut. Although Tindle initially defines himself as the son of an Italian immigrant with an English mother, in one of his later games with Wyke, he identifies himself as “Irish, Connemara. Spanish descent. By way of Uganda. My grandparents were slaves. My mother was a dark-eyed, dusky beauty.”39 Likewise, Wyke’s “pure” Englishness is undermined by his family’s Dutch connection. Also, his commitment to local, culture-specific values is exchanged for an emphasis on universalist ideals of success, which is mirrored by the interiors of his mansion, with its functional, minimalist architecture, cold lighting, and high-tech equipment. The only reminder of Englishness is the Georgian façade of the house, and the idyllic image of the surrounding grounds and garden. This architectural universalism is supported by the works of art that bejewel the interior. Although created by artists living in Britain, they do not connote Britishness for unknowledgeable audiences. While Gormley’s

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Angel of the North (1998) has been called an “icon of England,”40 his Feeling Material XX, which enhances Wyke’s interior, like Arad’s chairs, has more to do with an individual body’s accommodation and adaptation to urban architecture than with any sense of nationality. All in all, while the 1972 version of Sleuth features masculinities that are bound by class and nationality, the new version focuses more on masculinity scripts that are linked to the globally understood notions of status measured by the stock of one’s capital. Casting also accentuates the differences in the construction of masculinities. Sir Laurence Olivier’s and Michael Caine’s cinematic personae appear compatible with their roles in Mankiewicz’s Sleuth. Olivier was the key campaigner for the National Theatre and its first director, and hence was regarded as a representative of tradition. Caine, on the other hand, as Robert Shahil argues, deliberately created his public image with close association to his social background: “Caine’s public image, from the mid-1960s onwards, was carefully constructed through the media and built around his identification with the values of the newly ascendant, young, working classes.”41 He “remains an iconographic figure of the period, embodying both the strengths and limitations of a historic moment when the credentials required to be the all-conquering hero were essentially to be male, young and working-class.”42 Over thirty years later, and with a number of blockbusters in his pocket, Caine’s celebrity status has unavoidably changed. Rather than being associated with a working-class hero, he is now allied with broadly understood notions of Hollywood celebrity and British success across the Atlantic, with people like Hugh Grant and Jude Law following in his footsteps. This shift toward an association with a class- and nationality-free masculinity is also recognizable in Jude Law’s public persona. Law functions as a representative of the “body man,” who, although often class-connoted, is in his case clearly related to the image of a romantic, pan-class beau.43 His image as a sensitive metrosexual has been cemented by such films as The Holiday (2006), Closer (2004), and My Blueberry Nights (2007), as well as his many perfume and fashion campaigns (Dior Homme, Dunhill). It was also eternalized in Sam Taylor-Wood’s photo-series Crying Men (2004). With his androgenic physique and the roles in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Wilde (1997), and Sherlock Holmes (2009), he certainly encourages sexual fluidity to a greater extent than the seventies Michael Caine, who incarnates “the model of rampant male heterosexist arrogance” in Alfie (1966).44 And yet, although the homoerotic tension is more readily introduced in Branagh’s film, its function as a negation of “real” masculinity does not change.

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If we assume that, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued, an erotic triangle is “a sensitive register for delineating relationships of power and meaning, and for making graphically intelligible the play of desire and identification by which individuals negotiate with their societies for empowerment,”45 we can clearly see the differences in the micro-level distribution of power that both adaptations introduce. Describing the changes in social and media visibility and diversity of sexual groups in postwar Britain, Lesley A. Hall points out the heightened presence of the homosexual minority in the late sixties but at the same time warns against an overvaluation of the “permissiveness” of the “swinging London.” Despite visible changes, the decade was a time of anxiety, where old traditions wrestled with new liberal ideals.46 Interestingly, contemporary society, with its allegedly unprecedented celebration of fluid sexualities, also remains preoccupied with longstanding concerns of degeneration and deviancy connoted by homosexual lifestyles: The contradictions and inconsistencies of sexual attitudes and behaviour in contemporary Britain reflect the continuity of a tradition woven from diverse strands of liberalism, desire to morally police others, toleration, anxieties over the private / public divide, flurries of moral panic, concerns over social class, fears of disorder, the wish for a quiet life and appreciation of bawdy humour, rendered even more complex by an increasingly multicultural society.47

While complex attitudes toward sexuality characterize both decades, the contemporary remake of Sleuth articulates the tension between “homosocial” and “homoerotic” bonds with much more zeal, which is also an effect of transformations in cinematic and media depictions of non-normative masculinities.48 In “Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” Jules Glenn highlights the homosexual overtones of Shaffer’s play, arguing that the male protagonists are engaged in a lovehate relationship, with alternating feelings of affection and loathing.49 While Palmer identifies the “pronounced homosexual implications” of Mankiewicz’s film in the dress-up scene in Wyke’s cellar,50 and Thompson highlights the “sublime innocence of [Mankiewicz’s] subtext,”51 Pinter’s and Branagh’s transformation of the Second Act pronounces and twists this earlier unarticulated attraction of both men to each other. Pinter and Branagh explore the vagueness of the homosocial / homosexual relation throughout the film. Wyke and Tindle’s dialogues are full of double entendres: early in the film, Wyke begins to “respond to [Tindle’s] charm,” only to confess to Inspector Black: “As a matter of fact I liked him. I thought he was attractive. I thought we could have become good friends . . . He was really

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9.3 This tightly framed two-shot close-up of Milo (Michael Caine) and Andrew (Laurence Olivier) suggests their uncomfortable closeness, anticipating Andrew’s attempted seduction of his rival.

terribly sweet.” The game culminates in Pinter’s Third Act, in which he substitutes the story of Tea’s murder, allegedly committed by Tindle as an act of revenge, with Tindle’s seduction of Wyke (Illustration 9.3). “Excited by [Tindle’s] mind,” the twenty-first-century Wyke misapprehends his rival’s game and succumbs to the latter’s charm. Considerably flattered by Tindle’s remark – “I’ve always been attracted to rich and powerful men. Rich and powerful men make all the girls quiver like a jelly on a plate” – Wyke accepts, at least tentatively, the young man’s courtship and leads Tindle to his bedroom, where he receives the final and most humiliating blow by his wife’s lover. Tindle, having put on Maggie’s expensive coat, mocks Wyke: “How do you like me in this coat? Do you fancy me?,” only to kiss him on the lips, turn back, and go. But go he is not allowed to, as Wyke points a gun at him and shoots.52 This turn of events shows that, despite the changes in the articulation and scripting of male types, hegemonic masculinity is depicted as intrinsically heterosexual in both films. In both adaptations “[h]omophobia is a central organizing principle of [the] cultural definition of manhood.”53 Michael Kimmel understands homophobia in a broader sense, not as fear of gay men, but rather as “the fear that other men will unmask us, emasculate us, reveal to us and the world that we do not measure up, that we are not real men.”54 This wider problem is visible on the seismograph of the erotic triangle that Wyke, his wife, and her lover form in Shaffer’s Sleuth. The two male positions in the triangle, the hegemonic masculinity of Wyke and the non-hegemonic identity of Tindle, have been modified in both cinematic adaptations. Although adjusted to the social contexts and cinematic traditions in which the films were made, the

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masculinities in both versions of Sleuth are still dependent on the distinction from homosexuality and defined with reference to the female position in the triangle.

The absent woman As Gale Rubin argues in her early work and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick demonstrates in Between Men (1985), in traditional patriarchy male kinship seems to be a stronger bond than any male-female relationship. For both scholars, women appear to function as exchange property in male-male power networks.55 In Shaffer’s play, it seems, femininity serves primarily as a mirror to male self-indulgence and vanity. The absent woman creates a space for men to live out their patriarchal fantasies and to “prove” their masculinity. Away on a family visit, Marguerite is chiefly an object of transaction. Wyke uses her taste for luxury and little consideration for money as the bait for Tindle. In fact, in their conversations, Marguerite and jewels are equated.56 At the end of Act One, Wyke reveals his disdain for Tindle: “I hate you because you are a culling spick. A wop – not one of me. Come, little man, did you really believe I would give up my wife and my jewels to you? That I would make myself that ridiculous?”57 In response, Tindle compares Wyke to a “dog in the manger” that will not let go of his possession, and by that comparison associates their fight with an animalistic drive to protect one’s territory.58 In Mankiewicz’s adaptation, Marguerite also appears to function as an object of male desire. Although neither of the men is particularly fond of certain of her character traits – Wyke comments without scruples that she is “intolerably tiresome, vain, spendthrift, self-indulgent and really bloody crafty” – they both need her as an affirmation of their own status and dominance. Wyke’s attitude toward her seems particularly one-sided. He avows to having loved her once and yet treats her as his possession in word and action. When accused of tarnishing her name, he retorts: “If I choose to say that my wife converses like a child of six and makes love like an extinct shellfish, I shall,” only to warn Tindle that, in a year, he will spare no efforts to get rid of Marguerite. Wyke clearly values Marguerite’s social currency: “Whether I love her or not, I found her. I kept her. She represents me.”59 Wyke’s wife functions as a marker of his status. This representative role is confirmed by her portrait. Painted on a background of shimmering gold-silver-grey tones and mounted in a golden frame on the wall of her husband’s study, it shows Marguerite with an undoubtedly very valuable pearl chain and bracelet. Like her

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jewelry, she displays Wyke’s wealth. In his seminal work, Ways of Seeing (1972), John Berger links oil paintings to property, arguing that oils can provide the substantiality of depicted objects other painterly techniques cannot evoke. Because of that, they are best suited to the exhibition of one’s assets.60 Like all Wyke’s belongings assembled in his study and his living room, Marguerite’s portrait testifies not only to his taste but also to his class and economic position, and obviously affirms his masculinity. Despite his initially somewhat idealistic attitude toward Marguerite, Tindle also recognizes and confirms her status as a valuable object of exchange. When considering Wyke’s proposition to steal the jewels, Tindle is presented walking around the room and taking a glance at Marguerite’s portrait. Noticing the action, Wyke begins to talk about the painting, only to be suddenly interrupted by Tindle’s “I don’t think you’d hide your safe behind this [painting], I have seen it done in too many movies.”61 With this statement, Tindle agrees to undertake Wyke’s project. More importantly, his reaction reduces Marguerite to the fortune of which she is an indicator. Yet, reading Marguerite only in terms of an object of male desire and a symbol of male status would be a sweeping overgeneralization. Marguerite’s position is more complex. Writing about Mankiewicz’s female characters, Cheryl Bray Lower argues that despite the limitations imposed on the director by the social conventions and the Hollywood studio system, Mankiewicz managed to evoke in his films “the complex nature of a woman’s struggle to find her own identity in a conservative patriarchal culture.”62 Mankiewicz often stressed his fascination with female characters and bemoaned their absence in Shaffer’s play. This prompted him to introduce Marguerite’s surrogates to the screen.63 In fact, the 1972 film abounds in visual references to Marguerite. Frequent close-ups of her portrait in the moments of tension appear to construct her as a third participant. She is also connoted by her red coat, which is positioned at the door and seems to guard the entrance to the house. The female automaton playing the piano can also to be interpreted as her surrogate. Cuts to Marguerite’s portrait and to the pianist appear whenever Wyke’s plots become threatening to Tindle: both the portrait and the pianist seem to check and control his dealings. Pointing out the “gently misogynistic” attitude of Shaffer and Mankiewicz, Palmer argues that “with her voracious and hardly satisfiable appetite for what her man should provide,” Marguerite “is a burden difficult for any man to bear, causing the two to find apparently common ground.”64 Despite her burdensomeness and predatory appetites, Marguerite is only significant as long as she remains

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part of the erotic triangle that they all create. She is powerful only if she conforms to the status of an object of exchange, only as long as the men need and want her. In Branagh’s film, Maggie does not dominate the mise en scène to the extent that Mankiewicz’s Marguerite does. Despite that, rather than confirming male status, her uncanny presence in the house (she has decorated it and her coat and her picture are often shot out of focus between both men) threatens both men’s masculinity. She is the driving force behind the narrative’s progress. As the 1972 Tindle represents the interests of both lovers, the 2007 is primarily Maggie’s messenger. Black confirms Tindle’s role: “[your wife] insisted that [Tindle] comes to see you, as I know you know.” In fact, many of both men’s most daring revenge procedures are fueled by their recourse to Maggie’s opinion. Both are aware of the influence that she exerts over them. To prevent Wyke from shooting, Tindle appeases him: “[Maggie] admires your mind. Your mind excites her.” “Sexually?” asks Wyke. “Very. Your mind excites her sexually.” Both men realize that Maggie’s opinion is the key to the other man’s heart. Conscious of this, Maggie knows how to use the information to her advantage. The strength of her manipulative force can be easily seen in the men’s decisions. Tindle declines Wyke’s proposition to steal the jewels and live off the money with Maggie, and insists that when he consents to the robbery, she should be granted a divorce: “She wants a legal settlement. She wants a part of your estate.” It is her financial and legal independence that is at stake here rather than simply their joint future. Interestingly, when Wyke takes up courage to propose to Tindle that they “forget her, let her rot,” his wife intervenes. She calls and pits them against each other. When Wyke repeats his offer and warns Tindle: “Don’t let her dominate you. Be free like me,” his telephone rings, thus contradicting his words and showing his dependence on Maggie.65 In view of this, it is difficult not to interpret the absent woman in Sleuth, skillfully rewritten by Pinter, in accordance with the critics who regard “archetypal Pinter women” as “victimizers of their men, turning them into childish creatures who desire nothing more than to regress to the comfort of the womb.”66 While such an overgeneralization is simplifying with reference to Pinter’s oeuvre, the 2007 Sleuth offers little support against this argument. The post-millennium absent woman appears to exert more power over the men than either Shaffer’s or Mankiewicz’s Marguerite.

Male power struggle: from narrative to spectacle As the woman’s role has changed and masculinity scripts have become redefined, the male struggle for supremacy has been verified as well. In his

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battle over Marguerite, in which he also fights for the maintenance of his male identity, Shaffer’s Wyke uses detective fiction to defeat his rival. His revenge plot, taken from an eighteenth-century secret society book referencing initiation ceremony, is inflated by his frequent evocation of detective stories (Agatha Christie, Nicholas Blake) and continual references to his own creation, detective St. John Lord Merridew.67 In Mankiewicz’s film, Wyke’s male hegemony is also symbolized by his control over the medium of the detective novel. The characteristics of the novel are visualized and reflected by Wyke’s dwelling: its staged, excessive décor, an accumulation of exotic objects, theatrical sets, and a variety of ancient games. It is especially the hedge maze that represents his narrative superiority. The maze also becomes a sign of Wyke’s male omnipotence. His control over it symbolizes his jurisdiction over the narrative medium. This becomes clear when Tindle, while looking for Wyke, comes to a dead end in the maze and is allowed entrance to the heart of the labyrinth by Wyke himself as he reveals a hidden door in the hedge wall. The complicated form of the maze mirrors the complexity of the order that Wyke creates and lives in. His control depends on intricate (narrative) structures that only he recognizes and is familiar with. These formations grant him a head start in the game that is essential to the safeguarding of his male dominance. The labyrinth structure that he inhabits makes him resemble a twentieth-century Minotaur and Minos in one: a cruel tyrant, he is a halfman, half-bull enraged by the presence of another man. Yet the labyrinth is not only a complex monument to Wyke’s authority but also an evocation of the precarious state of his power. Minotaur was killed by Theseus, which also contributed to Minos’ loss of his supremacy over the Athenians, who had been bound to pay him an annual tribute of youths. The edifice that Minos erected to protect his status ultimately contributed to his final downfall.68 The unstable character of Minos’ power is vividly represented in a mosaic by Michelangelo, in which he is depicted with a snake sinking its teeth in his genitals.69 Mankiewicz’s film features a cross-reference to Michelangelo’s mosaic. When Tindle, intrigued by the voice he hears, enters Wyke’s garden, he is featured in the upper central part of the frame, while the lower central part belongs to the sculpture of a coiled snake whose head is directed at Tindle. This paralleling of Tindle and the snake suggests that Tindle’s intrusion in Wyke’s private space carries with itself considerable danger to the latter’s hegemony. At the same time, the snake refers to Tindle’s and Marguerite’s treacherous conduct and suggests that Tindle’s masculinity is also endangered by the encounter with his adversary. Tindle is the one whose

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infringement will crumble down the protective walls of Wyke’s oligarchy – his Garden of Eden – both in his novelistic and in his real world. Unlike Mankiewicz’s version, with its emphasis on narrative and detective story, Branagh’s Sleuth privileges television, film and, especially, CCTV as the media in relation to which masculinities are defined. The focus shifts from narrative to spectacle. Sterile and refined, Wyke’s residence is a picture of postmodern coldness and egotism. In fact, Wyke’s celebrity status, highlighted by the film, supports the reading of his dwelling as a space of a spectacle. In “Ambiguous Ecologies: Stardom’s Domestic Mise-enScène,” Simon Dixon discusses the ambiguous character of celebrities’ homes in which their public persona and their private selves meet: “the magazine photo shoot of the star ‘at home’ always suggests the star’s ambiguous placement between privacy and exhibition.”70 The contradictory character of Wyke’s house, both a private space and a stage for a spectacle, is supported by the presence of CCTV. While inevitably bound to the issue of power distribution, for David Lyon, CCTV is an inherently contradictory technology.71 Read with reference to Michel Foucault’s model of surveillance, CCTV can be said to contribute to the creation of docility by giving the observer an apparently total control over the surroundings.72 This is given prominence when Wyke observes Tindle’s attempts to claim the ladder on an electronic device, because of which Tindle’s life is literally in Wyke’s hands. However, the control that is based on such a form of surveillance is easily exchangeable, which becomes apparent when Tindle, disguised as Detective Inspector Black, expropriates Wyke’s remote control and begins to play with the lights, secret doors, and cameras, thus depriving Wyke of the instrument of his power. At the same time, transferred from the public space to the private apartment, CCTV can become “a desirable opportunity for self-display in front of the camera.”73 The CCTV, then, is for Wyke a device that guards his security but which also functions as an instrument of his self-expression and display. It requires that both he and Tindle enact their masculinity in front of the cameras while at the same time highlighting the performative and staged character of these scripts. Last but not least, like Wyke’s vigilance, CCTV is fallible: it registers neither Tindle’s nocturnal intrusion, nor the arrival of Wyke’s wife. As Wyke’s apparent dominance is conceptualized in spatial terms in both films, Tindle’s revenge, and thus also his usurpation of the hegemonic position, is shown as a narratological and spatial progress that demolishes the barriers Wyke has built to protect his identity. In Mankiewicz’s

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adaptation, this intrusion is an invasion of Wyke’s imaginary, labyrinthlike, literary space – an invasion of his narrative. In contrast, the 2007 adaptation highlights Tindle’s spatial progress in the house, which becomes a metaphor for his violation of Wyke’s physical and emotional barriers. Narrative, and its spatial metaphor of the maze, is the field of Wyke’s supremacy in the 1972 film. As Wyke literally opens the hidden door in the maze for his rival, metaphorically, he allows the latter to enter the imaginary space of his novels. Gradually, however, it is Tindle who takes control over the narrative flow. He begins to “pry into [Wyke’s] manhood” by twisting and re-directing the narrative development.74 First, disguised as Inspector Doppler, Tindle accuses Wyke of the murder of his wife’s lover. To add some spice to the investigation, Tindle prepares the crime scene a day before. When Wyke begins to tremble for his future, Tindle reveals his true identity. Yet it is his and Wyke’s lover Tea’s conjoint plot that serves as an ultimate twist in the narrative and thus proves to be the definitive tool of Wyke’s humiliation. Tindle admits to having killed Wyke’s lover and to having left four incriminating clues in the manor. At the same time, he claims having reported Wyke to the police, who now believe that the writer also hid the murder weapon. As Wyke comes down, having found all the objects, he learns that, like the previous story, this one has also been devised by Tindle to humiliate him. Twice in a row, Wyke has been defeated on the terrain of his expertise: the detective novel and its narrative. This final failure is suggestively represented in the film when, Tindle’s plotting revealed, Wyke drops the manuscript of his new book. His subsequent murder of Tindle is a way of regaining control over the story. Here, however, he also fails as the alarmed police arrive and, presumably, deprive Wyke of his imagined ending. In contrast, in the 2007 film, the establishment of male control is shown in spatial terms. Tindle’s clandestine nocturnal visit and the visit under the disguise of Detective Inspector Black invade Wyke’s space. Unlike in the 1972 version, Tindle turns Wyke’s house into a crime scene not when the latter is away but when he is soundly asleep at home, thus undermining his adversary’s control over this private space. The following day, as Black, Tindle desecrates the interior of Wyke’s house by smoking and by staining the floor with his beer bottle. He deprives Wyke of the remote control and begins to manipulate the space and light in the room, only to demolish the fish tank in order to recover the jewels that Wyke wanted him to steal. As he places these on Wyke and forces his rival to look in the mirror, he trespasses another barrier: that of Wyke’s proximate space. This violation makes Wyke uneasy, which is suggestively revealed in the

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distortion of his mirror reflection. The protective walls of his masculinity begin to crumble. The ultimate boundary that Tindle violates is that of Wyke’s intimate space. Having seduced Wyke, Tindle inspects the latter’s bed and avows, “I’m so glad that you offered me a place in your heart, in your life.”75 Yet, as Wyke lies down next to him and begins to stroke Tindle’s hair, the young man rejects him. This desecration of the most intimate of Wyke’s spaces, the space of his bed, is a death sentence for Tindle. Only his death can re-establish the most important of Wyke’s borders and thus the stability of his identity. As he lies on the bed and we see Tindle’s body in the lift shaft, the doorbell rings. Wyke’s wife has returned. Even if he eliminated one danger, there is another lurking at the door of his mansion, the portal of his male dominion. In addition to being a free agent who victimizes the men around her, Pinter’s and Branagh’s Maggie is also often in charge of the narrative and appears to control the filmic spectacle. At the outset of the film we are left with the impression that Wyke’s mansion is his male territory utterly controlled by him with the help of the panoptical gaze of his CCTV cameras. This impression, however, is undermined by the information that his wife is the interior decorator. While on the one hand, this clue supports Wyke’s masculine position,76 it also hints at Maggie’s operative dominance. In fact, some of the filmic frames may be taken to indicate her (if distant) presence behind the camera. Some of the camera angles not really justified by the plot development, certain shots of both men visible only on the screens within the screen, as well as Maggie’s infallible insight when to intervene, could mean that she has been following Tindle’s and Wyke’s game all along. She is the one who pulls the strings, which is ultimately shown by the ending of the film, reminiscent of the play’s final scene. As in the play the police arrive to catch Wyke red-handed, in Branagh’s version it is Maggie who parks her red car in between Tindle’s and Wyke’s cars and sounds the doorbell.

A seismic change? The seismic graph of the erotic triangle in the adaptations of Shaffer’s Sleuth shows considerable changes in the positioning and characteristics of hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities as well as altering the female role and agency. While the criteria of class and nationality seem to have become less prominent, replaced by a more “democratizing” category of capitalist ownership, masculinity still appears to be defined in opposition to

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homosexuality and femininity, even though a greater degree of sexual fluidity is allowed. Nonetheless, homosexual desire, like emasculation, is presented as a way of male humiliation rather than a possible solution to male power struggle. The continuous battle for supremacy highlights the instability of male positions, which require constant defense of territories. Both films use specific media spaces to show the precarious situation of hegemonic masculinities that define themselves by separation and borders in medial spaces. These spaces are used by men to establish and maintain their authority: male sovereignty materializes in male power over a certain medium. As in Mankiewicz’s film, the battle for hegemony is associated with the conquering of narrative, so in Branagh’s adaptation it is reflected in the control of the physical space. “Obey the rules” features prominently on the poster of Branagh’s Sleuth. Have the rules of the male game for supremacy really changed? In the “crises of masculinity” promulgated by the media, with masculinity types enough for everybody’s liking, from the muscle machos to sensitive “crying men,” who pride themselves in their homoerotic appeal, whose rules shall they obey? Shall we believe Liz Jones’s self-deprecating assertion that women are responsible for the changes in contemporary masculinity scripts: “The real culprits are women just like me. Bossy, over-achieving, high-maintenance madams who mistook the notion of being equal to men for a scenario in which we completely took over, infantilised them, cosseted them and ultimately castrated them?”77 Could this interpretation be suggested by Wyke’s shedding of his menacing mask and by Maggie’s arrival? Or could this just be another game? Perhaps men have learned to play this game to their advantage; and perhaps women, as much as they complain about their new-won independence, still hold a grudge against men for better opportunities and higher money, and endorse the game where they can show off? Maybe, as long as the rules of “men vs. women” and “heterosexuality vs. homosexuality” continue to structure the game, we shall never know. Notes 1. A. Shaffer, Sleuth: A Play (London: Marion Boyars, 2004): 65. 2. Sleuth, dir. J. Mankiewicz, perf. M. Caine, L. Olivier (Troy, MI: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2002 [1972]). 3. Sleuth, dir. K. Branagh, perf. J. Law, M. Caine (Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2008 [2007]). 4. M. A. Carlson, Deathtraps: The Postmodern Comedy Thriller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993): 97.

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5. On the success of the play, see “Sleuth Matinee Marks 1,000th Performance,” New York Times, April 5, 1973: 55; M. Gottlieb, “Sleuth: Broadway’s Longest Run,” New York Sunday News, July 1, 1973, Leisure sec.: 24. 6. B. Dauth (ed.), Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008): 128–129. 7. J. Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); J. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 8. J. Hearn and D. L. Collinson, “Theorizing Unities and Differences between Men and Between Masculinities,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. H. Brod and M. Kaufman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994): 97–119; Connell, Masculinities. 9. Connell, Masculinities; J. Hearn, The Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity, and the Critique of Marxism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 10. R. Connell and J. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender and Society, 19.6 (December 2005): 832. 11. J. Hearne, “Men, Identity and Power,” in The New Politics of Masculinity: Men, Power and Resistance, by F. Ashe (New York: Routledge, 2007): 125. 12. Connell, Masculinities; A. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1997); T. Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 2006); M. S. Kimmel, Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1987). 13. Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity: 24. 14. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: 40. 15. On various male types, see: M. L. Salzman, I. Matathia, and A. O’Reilly, The Future of Men (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); on “Menaissance,” see D. Haddow, “Welcome to the Menaissance,” Guardian, September 10, 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/10/menaissancedon-draper, accessed December 17, 2010. 16. E. Day, “Depressed, Repressed, Objectified: Are Men the New Women?,” Observer, August 3, 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/03/ gender.healthandwellbeing, accessed December 18, 2010. 17. Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: 41. 18. R. B. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations,” in Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays with an Annotated Bibliography and a Filmography, by C. B. Lower and R. B. Palmer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2001): 167. 19. P. French, “Sleuth,” Guardian, November 25, 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/ film/2007/nov/25/comedy.drama, accessed December 17, 2010. 20. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 167. 21. Shaffer, Sleuth: 23. 22. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 167. 23. Shaffer, Sleuth: 40. 24. Ibid., 18–20. 25. Quoted in Dauth, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews: 129. 26. Shaffer, Sleuth: 24.

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27. A. Marwick, “Class,” in A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000, ed. P. Addison and H. Jones (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 83. 28. Mankiewicz, Sleuth. 29. Marwick, “Class”: 84–88. 30. Ibid., 84. 31. Branagh, Sleuth. 32. Ibid. 33. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 171. 34. Mankiewicz, Sleuth. 35. Dauth, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews: 129. 36. “A Brief History,” Athelhampton House and Gardens, www.athelhampton.co. uk/Our_History.html, accessed December 19, 2010. 37. P. Panayi, “Immigration, Multiculturalism and Racism,” in Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change, ed. J. Strange, F. Carnevali, and Paul A. Johnson (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007): 253. 38. Ibid., 259. 39. Branagh, Sleuth. 40. “Angel of the North,” Icons: A Portrait of England, www.icons.org.uk/thei cons/collection/angel, accessed December 19, 2010. 41. R. Shahil, “Masculinity and Class: Michael Caine as ‘Working-class-hero,’” in The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, ed. P. Powrie, A. Davies, and B. Babington (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2004): 69. 42. Ibid., 75. 43. S. Hunt, “Body Image,” in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, ed. M. Flood, J. K. Gardiner, B. Pease, and K. Pringle (London: Routledge, 2007): 44. 44. Shahil, “Masculinity and Class: Michael Caine as ‘Working-class-hero’”: 72. 45. E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 27. 46. L. A. Hall, “Sexuality,” in A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939–2000, ed. Addison and Jones: 154–155. 47. Ibid., 159. 48. On the depiction of masculinity in films, see A. Spicer, Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003); P. Lehman (ed.), Masculinities: Bodies, Movies, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000); and P. Lehman, Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 49. J. Glenn, “Twins in Disguise: A Psychoanalytic Essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 43.2 (1974): 288–302. 50. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 169. 51. D. Thompson, “Biographical Dictionary of Film No 26: Kenneth Branagh,” Guardian, November 23, 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2007/nov/ 23/biographicaldictionaryoffil7, accessed December 17, 2010. 52. Branagh, Sleuth.

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53. M. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Brod and Kaufman: 103. 54. Ibid., 104. 55. On this, see E. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985) and G. Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. R. R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975): 157–210. 56. Palmer also reads the jewels as a metaphor for Marguerite; Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 169. 57. Shaffer, Sleuth: 50. 58. Ibid. 59. Mankiewicz, Sleuth. 60. J. Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972): 116–118. 61. Mankiewicz, Sleuth. 62. C. B. Lower, “The Mankiewicz Woman,” in Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Critical Essays, by Lower and Palmer: 75. 63. Quoted in Dauth, Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews: 133. 64. Palmer, “Literary Adaptations”: 169. 65. Branagh, Sleuth. 66. T. P. Adler, “Notes towards the Archetypal Pinter Woman,” Theatre Journal, 33.3 (1981): 377. 67. Shaffer, Sleuth: 62, 48. 68. R. Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology (London: Routledge, 2004): 336–348. 69. Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, 1537–1541, Sistine Chapel, Vatican City. 70. S. Dixon, “Ambiguous Ecologies: Stardom’s Domestic Mise-en-Scène,” Cinema Journal, 42.2 (Winter 2003): 81. 71. D. Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 72. D. Lyon, “The Search for Surveillance Theories,” in Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond, ed. D. Lyon (Collompton, Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006): 4. 73. Lyon, “The Search for Surveillance Theories”: 15. 74. Mankiewicz, Sleuth. 75. Branagh, Sleuth. 76. Dixon, “Ambiguous Ecologies”: 89. 77. L. Jones, “Who Created this Generation of Feeble ‘Hotel Mum’ Men? Er, I Did,” Mail Online, July 27, 2009, www.dailymail.co.uk, accessed December 10, 2010.

chapter 10

Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect: gender, class, and adaptation anxiety Cynthia Lucia

Eliza Doolittle – the cockney “guttersnipe” turned acceptable bourgeois parlor guest in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1912–1913) – speaks words to her tutor that continue to resonate powerfully through similar narratives of transformation: You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours.1

Echoing Eliza’s words, Rita (Susan) White – a twenty-six-year-old women’s hairdresser turned part-time student of literature in Willy Russell’s 1980 play Educating Rita – expresses her own profound sense of displacement: I’m a freak. I can’t talk to the people I live with any more. An’ I can’t talk to the likes of them on Saturday [her tutor’s university colleagues] or them out there [students on the campus lawn] because I can’t learn the language. I’m an alien.2

While telling the same general story of social and cultural elevation through education, these two plays, written decades apart, exhibit several noteworthy differences, among the most significant being that Eliza speaks of her displacement after her transformation is completed, raising serious questions about the motives and obligations of her tutor, Henry Higgins, and about the complex interplay between internal, “authentic” traits and the details of social performance that constitute identity. Rita experiences feelings of displacement at the mid-point of her progress – a point at which she is doubly displaced, yet retains faith in the process that remains vividly alive and ahead of her. She asserts, “I want to change” (Illustration 10.1), and proceeds to instruct her tutor, Frank Bryant, in how best to teach her to write a “proper” literary essay: “you’ve just gorra keep tellin’ me an’ then I’ll start to take it in; y’see, with me you’ve got to be dead firm . . . If I do 192

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10.1 Rita (Julie Walters) on her first visit to Frank’s office, dressed in a style and with a manner she will soon eagerly abandon.

somethin’ that’s crap, I don’t want pity, you just tell me, that’s crap.”3 Despite the differences, both works “speak to the same negotiation between individual and society, self and other,” Laura Grindstaff explains, referencing several other adaptations of Shaw’s play, and concludes that “If the Pygmalion impulse is to remake the woman into something other than she was, it also prompts a complicated chain of accommodation and resistance to this desire.”4 Both Eliza and Rita initiate and embrace the idea of change – Eliza with the goal of speaking proper English so that she can find work in a flower shop rather than selling flowers on the streets and struggling to survive in her hand-to-mouth existence; Rita with the goal of learning “everything,” of learning “how to see”5 and understand opera, literature, ballet. Both women seek freedom and perceive that gaining admittance to higher worlds of knowledge will provide greater comfort, security, and choice. Rita explains that the women who come into the beauty parlor mistakenly believe “they will walk out an hour later as a different person” and asserts that “if you wanna change y’ have to do it from the inside, don’t y’? . . . like I’m . . . tryin’ to do.”6 And although the focus on improving her speech and demeanor would suggest that Eliza’s transformation is centered on the external, Shaw contends that internal change is an inevitable consequence – with profound implications his character Higgins refuses to recognize. Vicki R. Kennell points out that beyond the changes in Eliza’s linguistics and physical bearing wrought by Higgins, “Eliza herself changes her psychological and philosophical selves, largely through the auspices of her sociological self interacting with others such as Mrs. Higgins [Henry’s kindly, perceptive mother] and Colonel Pickering [Henry’s well-mannered colleague].”7 From

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the outset in Educating Rita, Frank does understand the implications of change. Unlike Henry, who embraces the prospect of re-making Eliza, Frank only reluctantly agrees to transform Rita: “But don’t you see, if you’re going to write this sort of thing – to pass examinations, you’re going to have to suppress . . . perhaps even abandon your uniqueness. I’m going to have to change you.”8 Frank halfheartedly enables Rita to adopt and employ the language of academia, while Henry wholeheartedly enables Eliza to speak and be perceived as a duchess in the highest social circles. The freedom through transformation to which both women aspire, as guided by their male tutors, is “doubly fraught with contradiction,” as Grindstaff in reference to other Pygmalion adaptations points out, for although both women and men must embrace the “Law of the Father” in order to “gain cultural authority,” in contrast to men, “women are not the primary authors of these discourses.”9 Gender thus further complicates issues of social class and status. This is something Shaw also explores through the character of Eliza’s father, Mr. Doolittle, who has no need for training in speech and deportment in order to “become extremely popular in the smartest society by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvantage,” as Shaw explains in the Sequel to his play.10 The primary interest of this chapter will rest on Educating Rita, as adapted from Russell’s stage play to screen, and on the ways in which cinematic form, structure, and technique lend fertility to the stage play, to borrow Dudley Andrew’s concept.11 But I shall also spend significant time discussing Shaw’s Pygmalion and its several screen adaptations, given its strong influence on both versions of Educating Rita. Shaw’s Pygmalion itself is rooted, though ironically so, in the centuries-old Pygmalion myth. Ovid’s Pygmalion, with his desire to breathe life into a statue of the ideal female figure he has sculpted, has been the direct or indirect subject of numerous literary, filmic, balletic, musical, and artistic works and, as such, is one of the most frequently adapted of subjects, with Shaw’s play among the most interesting adaptations.12

Educating the master: lessons in gender, class, and identity Although a less-layered work than Shaw’s Pygmalion, Educating Rita nevertheless raises a number of its own interesting questions, particularly concerning the education not only of Rita but also of her tutor Frank. Both in the play and in the film (directed by Lewis Gilbert in 1983), Frank – a far less self-assured teacher than Henry Higgins – resists, with varying degrees of success, the male fantasy of dominance and possession underlying the

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Pygmalion myth, with its “idealised markers of femininity and the processes of objectification and anxiety that underpin the male lover’s fetishistic efforts to obtain and subsequently contain the ideal woman.”13 As a way of warning her off when she first appears in his office, Frank says to Rita, “I’m really an appalling teacher . . . Everything I know – and you must listen to this – is that I know absolutely nothing”14 and “eventually you’ll find there’s less to me than meets the eye.”15 The fact that playwright Willy Russell also wrote the screenplay perhaps accounts for the relatively straightforward adaptation insofar as content and theme are concerned. Yet Russell’s screenplay does significantly “open” the two-character, singlesetting stage play, inventing new characters and spanning varied locations. Julie Walters, who originated the title role on stage, stars in the film opposite Michael Caine as the literature professor assigned to be her tutor in the “Open University” program tailored to older, “non-traditional” students. Filmed entirely in Dublin, the setting is only vaguely defined, as it is in the play, with the location described as “the north of England.”16 The interconnecting themes of ambition and displacement in both the play and screen adaptation of Educating Rita intersect strongly with issues of independence and choice, ideas that were especially resonant in the early 1980s. At that time, the strength of second-wave feminism had just passed its peak and was beginning to decline in the US, especially with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1981, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment to gain ratification in 1982, and the increasing influence of New Right rhetoric on a range of social issues, including “family values” and women’s reproductive rights. As a UK production filmed when a new wave of conservatism was washing over Great Britain, as well, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in office, Educating Rita thoughtfully mediates its particular moment of ideological struggle and transition. The film gives expression to feminist values of the day, while offering something of an elegy to depleted masculinity. At the same time, however, Frank’s crisis is rooted in his own failings (Illustration 10.2) and in his particular way of understanding them rather than in any threat that female independence poses.17 Yet Frank does, indeed, feel threatened as Rita becomes more self-assured in her thinking, writing, and social interaction with other students. Her growing independence, however, is never shown to be the cause of his larger crisis, and the film itself supports this – she is not made to pay for making it on her own. Expressing his insecurity as Rita gains confidence and knowledge, Frank impetuously asks, “Is there much point in working towards an examination if you’re going to fall in love and set off for the South of [France],”18 aware that one of his male students takes an interest in Rita.

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10.2 Frank (Michael Caine) is drunk as he begins to lecture, a signal event on his downward slide from professional respectability.

When Rita eventually proclaims in both the play and the film, “I can do without you,” echoing Eliza’s words to Higgins, Frank’s limited understanding of her journey, like that of Higgins, is rooted in the insularity of middle-class privilege: rita: I’m educated, I’ve got what you have an’ y’ don’t like it because you’d rather see me as the peasant I once was; you’re like the rest of them – you like to keep your natives thick, because that way they still look charming and delightful. I don’t need you . . . I know what clothes to wear, what wine to buy, what plays to see, what papers and books to read. I can do without you. frank: Is that all you wanted? Have you come all this way for so very, very little? rita: Oh, it’s little to you, isn’t it? It’s little to you who squanders every opportunity and mocks and takes it for granted.19

Like Higgins in his tutelage of Eliza, Frank wishes to lay claim to Rita – not, however, as a possession he has formed and sculpted, but rather as the person she was before her transformation, ruefully casting himself as a kind of Frankenstein.20 Although Frank’s motives appear less self-serving, and he is, by and large, a more sympathetic character than Higgins, Rita makes her point that his infatuation with her “thick native” self bolsters his own fragile sense of empowerment, allowing him to take pleasure in and more easily colonize her “charming and delightful” performance of working-class identity. And in the film Rita does consciously “perform” – whether in her often comic entrances involving the stuck doorknob of Frank’s office, her compulsive need to stand and inspect everything in the room, or her movement always toward the window, an image that references the woman’s film of earlier decades in displaying a freedom so clearly visible and near yet ultimately unobtainable in a world governed by patriarchal imperatives.

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Her typically tart rejoinders, she admits, are an act: “I just take the piss because I’m not, y’know, confident. But I want to be.”21 Clearly, Russell complicates issues of gender with those of social class; whereas Shaw, one might argue, complicates issues of social class with those of gender. Shaw’s Pygmalion appeared when first-wave feminism was gathering strength, and offers a critique of unreconstructed masculinity resonant with that movement. Unlike Frank Bryant, who is able to acknowledge, if not correct, his flaws, weaknesses, and shortsightedness, the prickly Henry Higgins refuses to question his methods or admit to self-doubt. Although droll and amusing, Higgins, through much of the play, remains something of a self-involved adolescent, but one who insists upon his “rightful” exertion of adult male privilege. He appears compassionless to Eliza’s plight and proprietary in his “project” of remaking her: “You will jolly well see whether she has an idea that I haven’t put into her head or a word that I haven’t put into her mouth . . . I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden.”22 And while his blunt words are frequently the source of humor, they nevertheless are designed to reveal his limited understanding of Eliza. Only after his mother reprimands him and Eliza stands firmly up to him – as Rita does to Frank – is Henry able to admit that she is more than a project or an experiment, that “I shall miss you, Eliza. I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully.”23 His language, of course, takes everything away at the very moment he appears to give her credit, betraying an unwavering sense of masculine superiority, albeit amusing in the sexist attitudes Shaw so skillfully exposes. While Higgins continually expresses disdain for class distinctions, he nevertheless adheres strictly to gender distinctions. “Women upset everything,” he says earlier to Colonel Pickering.24 Blind to the meaning and impact of gender as it intersects with class, insofar as women and their lives in the world are concerned, Higgins, cold and clueless, replies to Eliza’s profound sense of displacement now that she has been accepted as a lady and the experiment has ended: “How the devil do I know what’s to become of you?”25 When she asks in panic, “What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do?,”26 he replies: [as if condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kindness]. I shouldn’t bother about that if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself somewhere or other, though I hadn’t quite realized that you were going away . . . You might marry you know . . . I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well.27

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Incapable of comprehending the meaning of her remark that equates middle-class marriage, as he presents it, with prostitution (“We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road . . . I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me, I’m not fit to sell anything else” [257]), Henry offhandedly replies, “Tosh, Eliza. Don’t insult human relations by dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it. You needn’t marry the fellow if you don’t like him.”28 Deeply wounded, Eliza must come to terms with her new identity, having internalized what her transformation means in human terms, in terms of self-respect and respect accorded by others. Addressing her words to Colonel Pickering, she says: Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street . . . was the beginning of self-respect for me . . . You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady and always will.29

Decades later, Rita echoes Eliza’s understanding that identity is a complex amalgam of one’s ability to “perform” according to social conventions that are continually, if subtly, shifting; and of one’s perception of self that is both shaped by and gives shape to external factors that feed back to inform it (Illustration 10.3).30 Rita recognizes this most clearly in the way her mere desire to change has redefined her relationship to her husband

10.3 Rita with her husband and in-laws at the “local” on the night she discovers she has no voice to join in their song.

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Denny, who feels threatened by her studies and her resistance, in the face of his insistence, to have a child. In the screen adaptation, Denny’s frustration is fueled by Rita’s father, who berates her for her lack of interest in motherhood at the poignant moment of her younger, already pregnant sister’s wedding. Although her father is shown as a rigidly inflexible working-class patriarch, Denny is depicted, rather, as confused about the force of a change he never anticipated or imagined. In both the play and the film Rita acknowledges the complicated ways in which identity is formed and re-formed: I see him lookin’ at me sometimes, an’ I know what he’s thinking; he’s wonderin’ where the girl he married has gone to. He even brings me presents sometimes, hopin’ that the presents will make her come back. But she can’t because she’s gone, an’ I’ve taken her place . . . I told him I’d only have a baby when I had a choice. But he doesn’t understand. He thinks we’ve got choice because we can go into a pub that sells eight different kinds of lager.31

With his superior attitude of paternalism, as a “confirmed bachelor” who rejects women (other than his mother) as “idiots,” Henry in Pygmalion is certainly as sexist as Rita’s working-class father and husband. But in cleverly donning the masquerade of the enlightened egalitarian, he effectively shuts down (for himself) any need to consider gender. When Eliza challenges his rudeness of manner toward her, he responds: The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another . . . the question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.32

Eliza’s retort in calling him a “born preacher” has the effect of exposing his myopic vision and a degree of hypocrisy, both in his having shifted the subject away from the personal and in his larger project, centered entirely on her speech and manners – all with an acute awareness of class distinction. When she proclaims, “If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence,” Higgins’s retort rings rather hollow: “That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent one on another.”33 Frank, likewise, is shown to be as willfully blind to Rita’s struggle in the context of social class as Henry is to Eliza’s struggle in the context of gender in a patriarchal world. When Frank has invited Rita to a dinner party at his home, she looks in from the outside unable to enter, thinking that she is

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wearing the wrong clothes, had bought the wrong wine, and would have nothing of substance to say. This moment prompts her deeply held feelings of displacement quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Later, Frank casually remarks, “You weren’t expected to dress up or buy wine,” to which she angrily replies: “If you go out to dinner, don’t you dress up? Don’t you take wine?” The dialogue that ensues exposes the insularity of Frank’s experience, much as Henry’s insularity is exposed in Pygmalion: frank: Why couldn’t you relax? It wasn’t a fancy party. You could have come as yourself. Don’t you realize how people would have seen you if you’d just – just breezed in? They would have seen someone who’s funny, delightful, charming. . . rita: But I don’t want to be charming and delightful; funny, what’s funny? I don’t want to be funny. I wanna talk seriously with the rest of you . . . I don’t want to be myself. Me? What’s me? Some stupid woman that gives us all a laugh because she thinks she can learn, because she thinks one day she’ll be like the rest of them, talking seriously, confidently, with knowledge, live a civilized life. Well, she can’t be like that really but bring her because she’s good for a laugh.34

Trying to enlighten Frank, while at the same time explaining her desire to learn, Rita speaks of the absence of culture in her working-class world, saying “I don’t see any culture; I just see everyone pissed or stoned tryin’ to find their way from one empty day to the next.”35 She adds that she would never express this to her friends because in their pride they proclaim they do possess a culture, centered on “the pub quiz” and “singin’ karaoke.” When Frank proposes that this may be what they want, what makes them happy, Rita interrupts: “But they don’t want that! There is no contentment. Because there’s no meanin’ left.” She compares the consumerist present with the more difficult past, observing that when people talk about years of struggle during the war, for instance, “their eyes light up . . . because there was some meanin’ then. But . . . now that most of them have got some kind of a house an’ there is food an’ money around, they’re better off, but honest, they know they’ve got nothin’ as well – because all the meanin’s gone.”36 Frank does not fantasize a classless society as Henry does but nevertheless discounts the implications of class difference; Henry dismisses the implications of women’s struggles, experiences, and perceptions as possibly different from his own. On these subjects and with differing degrees of success, it is up to Eliza and Rita to tutor their tutors. Pygmalion in Ovid’s Metamorphoses “loathing their lascivious Life, / Abhorred all Womankind, but most a Wife: / So single chose to live, and shunned to wed,”37 and Henry Higgins, as a self-proclaimed “confirmed

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bachelor,” likewise expresses his discomfort with, if not disdain for women (“they’re all idiots”). Frank, on the other hand, turns his hatred inward, thus distancing himself from genuine emotional commitment and engagement, just as Henry’s superior attitude does. By exposing Frank’s core of raw vulnerability, Russell evokes sympathy for Frank – a less complicated, less ambivalent sympathy than Shaw evokes in Henry. Frank is as self-absorbed in his drinking as Henry is in his elocution technology: “the great thing about the booze is that one is never bored when drinking. Or boring for that matter; the booze has this marvelous capacity for making one believe that underneath all the talk one is actually saying something.”38 He is burdened by his own failure as a poet and his failed relationships with women – we only hear about the wife who divorced him, but in the screen adaptation we do meet Julia, the former student and literature professor with whom he now unhappily lives. Frank’s self-loathing, at the same time, morphs into a performative self-pity that he sometimes uses to manipulate Rita’s (and others’) sympathies. In his discussion of tragedy vs. the tragic (presented in dialogue with Rita in the play and a classroom lecture in the film), one senses Frank’s secretly and perhaps subconsciously casting himself as a tragic hero: “tragedy is something that is absolutely inevitable, preordained almost.” In discussing Macbeth, he may well be talking about himself: “He’s warned . . . constantly warned. But he can’t go back . . . with every step he’s spinning one more piece of thread which will eventually make up the network of his own tragedy.”39 This vision allows him to abnegate responsibility for the need to change. In describing his relationship with Julia he says, “She’s very caring, very tolerant, admires me enormously and spends a good deal of time with her head in the oven.”40 While his self-deprecating humor is engaging, his “tragic” course, paradoxically, is also his means of gaining control – whether over the university administration that, as he says, “didn’t tell me to stop drinking, they told me to stop displaying the signs”41 or to some degree over Rita, with whom he never becomes romantically involved but to whom he modestly, often in the guise of gentle humor, expresses his affection: “If it was up to me, what I’d like to do is take you by the hand and run out of this room forever . . . there are a thousand things I’d rather do than teach – most of them with you, young woman.” When he asks, “Oh Rita! Why didn’t you walk in here twenty years ago,” after her comic quip (“Because I don’t think they would have accepted me at the age of six”), Rita plainly states the incontrovertible truth: “It’s now – you’re there an’ I’m here.”42

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Masculine dominance, female independence, and adaptation/performance anxiety Rita’s assertion of independence at the end of the play and the film – refusing Frank’s offer to accompany him on a two-year teaching stint in Australia (an exile imposed by the university as punishment for his overt, embarrassing display of drunkenness in a lecture hall) – is in fact, not only an expression of its time, in line with second-wave feminism as many critics have pointed out, but also very likely the most faithful rendering of Shaw’s conclusion to Pygmalion produced up to that time – whether in film or on the stage, and whether during Shaw’s lifetime or thereafter. Shaw’s original 1912–1913 ending of the play has Eliza asserting her independence from her teacher with unambiguous resolve, though not without wounded feelings. The play remains open-ended insofar as her future is concerned. Rita, likewise, expresses her need for the fundamental freedom to choose, as she says in response to Frank’s offer at the end of the play: “I might go to France. I might go to me mother’s. I might even have a baby. I dunno. I’ll make a decision. I’ll choose, I dunno.”43 The play ends with Rita, herself, now playing Pygmalion, promising to “take ten years off” Frank’s appearance by giving him a proper haircut. Although Rita also cuts Frank’s hair in the film, the final scene is set at the airport, where she sees him off to Australia. While certainly we don’t know what she will choose, we do know that a life with Frank will not be among those choices. The similarly unresolved question of Eliza’s future prompted various stage and film adapters, whether directors or actors, either to imply or unambiguously declare that Eliza would, indeed, return to Higgins – a point on which Educating Rita intervenes most decidedly on Shaw’s behalf. Although Higgins appears blindly secure in his masculinity, it would seem that many male members of the theatrical (and later the film) establishment experienced some sense of crisis in dealing with Eliza’s independence. In various ways, they tempered (or completely undermined) Eliza’s choice, further undermining the play’s provocative ambiguity. As a result, Shaw felt compelled to write a prose “Sequel” to the play in 1916. Unlike Ovid’s Pygmalion, who marries and lives happily with his now animate sculpture Galatea – “a Maid, so fair, / As Nature could not with his Art compare”44 – Eliza, Shaw states explicitly in the Sequel, does not marry the supremely smug Higgins, who is so mistakenly confident in assuming he holds Pygmalion-like power over her. After their verbal duel that takes place in his mother’s home, Higgins, in Shaw’s original 1912–1913 ending, orders Eliza to buy a few groceries and to pick him up a pair of gloves and a tie on

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her way back to his home, where she has lived for months since his tutelage began. Eliza “disdainfully” “sweeps out,” according to stage directions, now ordering him, “Buy them yourself.” When Higgins’s mother offers to buy them, Higgins “sunnily” utters the last words of the play: “Oh don’t bother. She’ll buy em all right enough. Goodbye.” Stage directions tell us that after kissing his mother, “Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.”45 The “‘richly suggestive’” ending, as L. W. Conolly quotes Shaw’s biographer A. M. Gibbs as having termed it,46 was deeply unsettling, it would seem, to actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who originated the role of Henry. In his April 1914 performance, he approached Eliza “like a bereaved Romeo” and, most famously on July 15, 1914 – the 100th performance – threw flowers toward Eliza as she exited the stage.47 Tree’s actions, of course, had the effect of “sabotaging . . . Shaw’s intentions” that otherwise would have given rise to “interesting talking points for the audience as they leave the theatre,” as Conolly explains: “Is Higgins’s self-satisfied confidence that Eliza will return justified? And if she does return, what will her relationship with Higgins be? Does Eliza’s imperious exit indicate emancipation from her teacher and a new life independent of him?”48 In his “Sequel,” Shaw’s frustrated comments seem directed toward stage artists, readers, and audiences: The rest of the story need not be shewn in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-mades and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision.49 Shaw’s statement reflects his admiration for Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, which he reviewed both in 1889 and 1897, and which is often cited as a significant source for Pygmalion.50 In the introductory essay to his edition of Pygmalion, Conolly quotes Shaw’s 1897 review on Nora’s leaving her husband as “‘an impulse of duty to herself,’” describing her slam of the door as “‘the end of a chapter of human history . . . more momentous than the cannon of Waterloo or Sedan.’”51 The alterations in performance of Pygmalion thus truly dismayed him. In the Sequel, Shaw goes on to explain that Eliza’s decision, like that of any woman in the early twentieth century, would “depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age and income.”52 Once again, in Educating Rita Russell adopts not only

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Shaw’s theme but also his prescient language, which was the language of contemporaneous second-wave feminism, as well. Over the course of some fifteen pages, Shaw provides a thorough analysis of those factors defining freedom of choice relative to Eliza and to the other characters as they operate within larger social and class contexts. Beneath “age and income” also lie the freedoms and limitations of gender – a factor that tacitly informs all of Shaw’s arguments. Eliza, Shaw explains, will marry Freddy Eynsford Hill, a young man whose mother is a friend of Mrs. Higgins, at whose home Freddy first meets and is smitten with Eliza during a “test-run” Higgins orchestrates, introducing his newly tutored and sculpted Eliza into drawingroom culture. Freddy, Shaw explains, is much nearer Eliza’s age than is Higgins: he is a gentleman . . . and speaks like one . . . and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not bullied and beaten.53

Some feminist critics have taken exception to the Sequel, in which Shaw presents Eliza as less intelligent and talented than in the play and has her remain financially dependent on Colonel Pickering when she and Freddy at first struggle to make a go of their flower shop – all of which seem to diminish their complete independence.54 It is important to note, however, that Shaw is acknowledging the same social and economic factors that would likely have reduced the opportunities for any woman striking out on her own in that era (and factors that Henry Higgins chooses to ignore).55 At the same time, however, the critics are correct in pointing out that Shaw frames Eliza’s choices in contingency to the men who surround her – whether Freddy, who has class standing but no money or practical workplace skills; Higgins, who either is indifferent or who feigns it, while simultaneously claiming his “ownership” of Eliza (“Let her find out how she can get on without us. She will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow”56 and later when Eliza announces she will marry Freddy, “I’m not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy”57); the Colonel, who offers kindness and financial assistance; or Eliza’s father – “formerly a dustman” who, through his native wit, has “shot up at once into the highest circles . . . [but] absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing to Eliza’s support,” as Shaw explains in the Sequel.58 The Sequel, of course, was not intended for performance, prompting Shaw once again to revisit the play’s ending at least twice, according to Conolly. For a 1920 London production, Shaw has Higgins watch from his

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mother’s balcony, as Eliza exits onto the street. He returns “‘triumphantly’” and says simply “‘Galatea!’” “Shaw believed that this would show that ‘the statue had come to life at last,’” with Eliza asserting her independence as a human being. As Conolly points out, however, it also “implies at least the possibility that the play follows the myth and that just as Pygmalion marries Galatea so Higgins marries Eliza.”59 In a 1939 published version of the play, Shaw made yet another change – Eliza comments on the size and style of gloves Higgins should have and says that she has already spoken to his housekeeper about ordering the ham,60 thus asserting her own propriety, it would seem, over Higgins, and implying, at least, that she remains in charge. (Rita’s subjecting Frank to a haircut has something of the same effect.) In this version, before Eliza determinedly exits rather than saying, “Buy them yourself,” she says, “What you are to do without me I cannot imagine,”61 paraphrasing Higgins’s earlier words about her and indirectly, it would seem, expressing a dimension of her own desire. Mrs. Higgins, rather than offering to shop for the items her son has requested, instead speaks about Eliza. Shaw retains her first line from the original dialogue, but then adds another line concerning a possible romance between Eliza and Pickering: mrs. higgins: I’m afraid you’ve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering. higgins: Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha hahahaha!!!!! [He roars with laughter as the play ends]62

This version is far more interesting in its ambiguity that runs in both directions. The 1938 screen adaptation, with Shaw as screenwriter, was also subject to revised endings, first by Shaw, then by others. In a 1934 version of the screenplay, Shaw places Higgins on the balcony of his mother’s home, looking down on Eliza and Freddy kissing: “Higgins shakes his fist at the couple while Eliza ‘cocks a snoot’ in response and Freddy ‘takes off his hat to HIGGINS in the Chaplin manner.’” This, it would seem, is unambiguous in terms of Eliza’s immediate action but rather more ambiguous in terms of whether someone like Freddy could possibly make her happy. Shaw’s revised 1938 screenplay shows “‘a vision of the future,’” with Eliza and Freddy running their successful flower/green-grocer shop, as Shaw describes their business in the 1916 Sequel.63 The film’s co-directors, Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard (who also played Higgins), along with producer Gabriel Pascal, surreptitiously changed this ending for a new one that

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“shows not the married independent business woman that Shaw wanted, but a subservient Eliza returning to Higgins’s home,” an ending, according to Conolly, that Shaw saw for the first time just two days before the film’s premiere.64 The 2005 Criterion Collection DVD version of the 1938 film has Higgins watch as Eliza gets into a car with Freddy. He runs down into the street, both frantically and angrily – betraying genuine concern beneath his façade of indifference. He walks the streets purposefully, yet with some degree of humility as if to follow them, with a dissolve implying that he has traveled quite a distance before entering his Wimpole Street home and, on doing so, immediately smashes his collection of gramophone records on which he recorded Eliza’s voice during their elocution lessons. One disk remains on the gramophone, however, and Henry’s jacket accidentally snags the switch. Eliza’s untutored cockney voice – recorded during their very first session when she protests that she is not as dirty as he accuses her of being – fills the room: “I washed my face and hands before I come, I did.” Higgins appears distraught and defeated when he hears her voice, only to be surprised (as we are also) to hear her voice again, repeating the same words without the cockney inflection. Having just entered the room, Eliza (Wendy Hiller) stands at the door as the camera tracks into a close-up, capturing her soft, affectionate eyes as she gazes at Henry. A cut to Leslie Howard as Higgins registers his momentary relief, followed by a conscious pulling back of emotion and an assertion of control. The film ends as he turns his back to Eliza and the camera, leans back in his chair, tips his hat down over his eyes, and asks with supreme self-assurance, “Where the devil are my slippers, Eliza?” – the final words of the film, as romantic music swells. While Henry’s arrogance is unsettling and potentially exposes his character to critical appraisal as Shaw’s play does, Eliza’s compliance – stated simply in her presence – has the effect of supporting his “rightful” position of dominance. George Cukor directed My Fair Lady, an American musical version of Shaw’s play, itself adapted from the Broadway musical that premiered in 1956. The film adaptation appeared in 1964 – just as movement politics would give birth to second-wave feminism and at the point when the maledominated Hollywood studio system, as it had operated for decades, was itself in crisis and undergoing radical transition, factors that directly or indirectly may have shaped approaches to the adaptation. This adaptation, like the 1938 film, confirms the “rightful” position of Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) as “master” of Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), though Harrison’s Henry is rather more repentant than Howard’s was. Here, on his way home after Eliza has gone off with Freddy, he sings in melancholy

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tones, “I’ve grown accustomed to her face,” a line from Shaw’s play that the musical team of Alan Jay Lerner, as lyricist, and Frederick Loewe, as composer, have greatly elaborated upon with the effect of more fully humanizing Henry (“Her joys, her woes, her highs and her lows, are second nature to me now”), thus inviting the audience to sympathize with his sense of loss and (modest) contrition. At the same time, however, the lyrics have him angrily speculate upon her marriage to Freddy (with snippets borrowed from Shaw’s Sequel). He confidently concludes (unlike in Shaw’s Sequel) that she’ll be knocking on his door in only a year or so, and he “shall never take her back,” until he once again faces the fact that her every word, gesture, and movement are now inextricably part of him – so that in the process of transforming her, he also has been transformed. As he enters his house, long shot framing emphasizes his isolation and the emptiness now that she is gone. He smashes no records as his character in the 1938 film had, and he consciously, rather than accidentally, turns on the phonograph replaying their first conversation. The camera slowly tracks toward him as he sits pensively, clearly distraught. In this version, his back is to the door, as a cut reveals Eliza’s entrance before Henry is aware of her presence. She lifts the needle from the phonograph and, this time adopting her former cockney dialect, repeats, “I washed my face and hands before I come, I did.” With his back still toward Eliza, Henry says her name, softly, expectantly. With broader gestures perhaps conveying a degree of selfconscious parody to temper the display of arrogance that informed Leslie Howard’s performance, Rex Harrison slouches in his chair, pushes his hat down over his eyes, and speaks the same final words, asking for his slippers. In this version – with the camera positioned in front of Henry – we see Harrison’s “performance” as just that. Howard, by contrast, initially faces Eliza, and they exchange glances before he turns away from her (and from us) and requests his slippers. Howard’s turning away in Pygmalion also, to some extent, draws reflexive attention to his “performance” as male and (therefore) as master. In never having Higgins turn to face Eliza while allowing him to face us, My Fair Lady simultaneously humanizes him, stressing his vulnerability as the earlier song had, yet places the reins of power just as unambiguously in his hands – through the “control” he exhibits in his performance. The expression of masculine power in Howard’s performance is more coldly depersonalized with the close-up of his turned head and hat filling the frame, an image that lends visual weight to his earlier words in response to Eliza’s request for “a little kindness”:

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If you can’t stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Oh it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real, it’s warm, it’s violent. Not like science, literature and classical music and philosophy and art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well. Then marry some sentimental hog or other.

His words very nearly echo those of the play.65 The final shot in My Fair Lady allows us to see not only Henry but also Eliza as she slowly and affectionately takes two steps in his direction, with his back still turned to her. Costumed in a diaphanous pink dress, with sheer petals of fabric framing her face, Eliza and her forward movement close the film in highly romanticized terms, lending even less doubt as to the future of their relationship than the 1938 version did. At the same time, the elaboration through song and choreographed movement of Henry’s loss and longing for Eliza, and his vulnerability at the prospect of her absence, provides the necessary groundwork for audience investment in this happy ending – Harrison’s Higgins has more fully “earned” a life with Eliza than Howard’s Higgins has. My Fair Lady thus manages to play it both ways, to paraphrase Thomas Schatz in his discussion of Hollywood genre films that typically appear to question dominant ideology while simultaneously reinforcing it.66 The film both registers and pushes back against Betty Friedan’s claims in The Feminine Mystique, a groundbreaking feminist book published a year before the film’s release. Often credited with sparking second-wave feminism in the US, Friedan’s book convincingly counters the dominant cultural belief that women are fulfilled in lives of domesticity, devoted exclusively to serving the needs of their husbands and children. The book illustrates the ways in which the male-dominated media and consumerist culture over decades helped to shape the myth of domestic fulfillment – one that very few of the housewives she interviewed actually confirmed. In presenting and elaborating upon Henry’s character and his affection for Eliza, the 1964 film works much as Schatz and Friedan claim the mainstream media, including Hollywood genres, function: My Fair Lady implies that Eliza will be more than happy in her life devoted to fetching Henry’s slippers and doing things on his terms. This works in opposition to the image Shaw had envisioned in his screenplay of her future as a businesswoman running a flower shop, with Freddy the more submissive partner in the marriage. Costuming in My Fair Lady transforms Eliza into the feminine ideal – soft, beautiful, and implicitly compliant. The sumptuous visuals work to endorse the film’s conclusion that married life with Henry will be fully gratifying for Eliza, though we also expect that verbal sparring will continue – a mere tip of the hat here,

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while in the 1938 film a more decided generic alliance consistent with the verbal and intellectual strength of women in screwball comedy. The more austere look, performance choices, and costuming of the 1938 film lend (unwittingly perhaps) a more layered, interesting, and complicated air to the resolution. Both films nevertheless conform to the standardized happy endings that Shaw reviled – even in the context of romance and comedy.

Adapting Rita and cinematic choice A film that engages with the gender politics of its day, Educating Rita is, nevertheless, conventional in style and structure, as with its source play. Just as costuming, shot composition, and countless visual and sound devices shape the ideological content of My Fair Lady and Pygmalion, so also is this true of Educating Rita, thus prompting the question: is Rita as fully reflective of female independence as its story and content would suggest? The answer is both yes and no. While far less elaborate a production than My Fair Lady, to be sure, Educating Rita employs mise en scène, particularly Rita’s costuming and hairstyle, as markers of her transformation, just as they are indicators of social class. When she first appears, Rita is wearing short, tight skirts (including some padding, it seems, to lend a fuller figure at the beginning than is discernable later), and sandal heels that give her considerable trouble on the campus cobblestones. Her hair is short, styled, and dyed blonde – initially with an orange streak or two. As she transforms herself, as she becomes more educated, her clothing generally shifts from primary colors to more muted earth tones; her hair grows longer and more free-flowing, and upon her return from summer university classes her hair has returned to its natural brown. Director Lewis Gilbert and production designers were careful to make these changes gradual and subtle. Rita’s dialect remains consistent throughout the play and film, save for a moment when she (poorly) affects upper-class diction, under the influence of her roommate Trish, who has said, “there is not a lot of point in discussing beautiful literature in an ugly voice.”67 This moment is a direct wink and a nod to Pygmalion. Frank and his colleagues are a ragtag bunch in the ivory-tower tradition, dressed in frayed tweeds, fabrics drained of discernable color or style, and hair that hasn’t seen a stylist for months, if not years. Rita’s perpetual motion and costuming (even fully into her transition) provide commentary, to be sure, on her energy, authenticity, and hunger for knowledge in contrast with this uninterested and uninteresting group of academics – save for Frank. His

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outlook is jaded to be sure, but he retains a spark of humor, curiosity, and goodwill, confirmed through his ability to appreciate and find amusement in and with Rita – and in some ways confirmed, if counter-intuitively, through his attachment to alcohol, which, however self-destructive, speaks of a conscious commitment to something. Among the many literary works referenced in the play and film is T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which seems especially relevant to the character of Frank, whose drinking is a response to a life drained of meaning and commitment.68 Willy Russell’s screenplay derives much humor from Frank’s colleagues. Most amusing is the literature professor Brian (Michael Williams), who is carrying on an affair with Frank’s partner Julia (Jeananne Crowley). Whether in their offices on campus or at Frank’s home when Brian and his wife Elaine (Dearbhla Molloy) are there for dinner, Brian inevitably begins groping Julia just as Frank makes an entrance, with Brian’s response always to pick up a nearby telephone, feigning a contentious and pretentious conversation with his publisher. His squat build and ill-fitting toupee, along with his condescending manner, form an amusing type. One might see the faintest of echo of Eliza’s father Doolittle in Brian, in his comic turns and his blustery self-presentation, but beyond these qualities the resemblance ends, given the much larger role and thematic import of Doolittle, his acute self-knowledge, and his declamation on middle-class morality. While Brian in many ways embodies the hypocrisy of middle-class morality, Russell’s screenplay makes him largely a figure of fun. Brian’s wife Elaine appears nothing if not catatonic, planted in a chair in Frank’s living room and uttering barely a word. More poignantly, Russell creates the character of Denny, Rita’s husband, a good-natured chap, for the most part, whose sense of self is entirely tied to preserving his masculine pride, which is limited to the power he can exert in his home over Rita and the unborn children he wishes to father. Russell and Gilbert first present Denny as he’s knocking down a wall, combining two rooms to “improve the house.” Shot composition emits a bit of light from the room he’s breaking into, conveying the constraints imposed on his worldview by limited money, imagination, and opportunity. When Rita asks him to join her at the theatre, he reminds her of their plans to meet friends at the pub, saying, “I don’t like ya doin’ this so just leave me outta it.” When Rita capitulates and takes a clumsy and comic hand in the demolition, agreeing also to go to the pub, Denny tries to reassure himself: “You’re still my girl, aren’t ya?” Their home is shot in muted light with images composed through hallways, doorways, or on the staircase, positioning Rita in entrapping,

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claustrophobic spaces. Whereas she moves freely in Frank’s office, in her home Rita’s movements are confined – she typically remains static, sitting or standing in one spot. Denny has greater freedom of movement in the house, but even his movements are constrained – prompted usually by frustration or anger, as when he discovers Rita’s hidden birth-control pills and reacts by burning her books. At the wedding reception for her younger sister, Rita’s sense of displacement is made palpable. Editing patterns highlight small details – a young boy surreptitiously sipping a glass of Guinness, a little girl stealing a taste of cake, and Rita’s father still fuming at his older daughter’s rejection of motherhood and patriarchal rule. On the dance floor, Denny orders Rita to stop attending the university and to quit taking the pill. She responds that she “loves” learning because it makes her feel that she’s “in the land of the livin’,” words that prompt Denny to walk out. The camera slowly tracks backward from a close-up of Rita to a long shot emphasizing her isolation as couples around her continue to dance to the upbeat music. As in several other scenes, the tracking camera here conveys the larger contingencies of family, friends, and their values with which Rita must negotiate. Shot composition in the scene that follows, when Rita tells Frank about the split-up with Denny, likewise conveys her dislocation. Unlike earlier scenes shot from inside as Rita stands at Frank’s window, the camera now is placed outside the window, with the effect of further isolating her – we hear Frank’s voice but we do not see him in the frame, implying that, in spite of his tutelage and support, Rita must make it on her own. At the airport in the closing scene, Frank and Rita embrace as close-ups reveal Frank’s unrequited longing and Rita’s sincere affection for Frank, as well as the difficulty of separating and making independent choices. The last words of the film are Rita’s – “Frank, thanks” – words that acknowledge both his role in having helped her and her commitment to freedom and continued growth. As Rita walks down a long corridor, she pauses for a moment to turn in Frank’s direction before more purposefully walking forward – a long take capturing the mixture of independent resolve, isolation, and the seemingly infinite distance still to be traveled. This “happy ending” involves both uncertainty and possibility – and confirms the value of friendships like the one with Frank that would never have developed had Rita not taken the first steps toward independence. In refusing romantic coupling, the film lines up with what Shaw had hoped to present in the stage and screen productions of Pygmalion. While both versions of Educating Rita admirably intervene in presenting an unambiguous image of female independence as Shaw’s play and Sequel

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do – with the clear sense that Frank and Denny in Rita, like Henry and Pickering in Pygmalion, will simply have to adjust to life without Rita and Eliza – one can’t help but wonder about the potentially more progressive statements the play and film might have made. While wishing to examine Russell’s work primarily on its own terms, I find it of some interest to imagine how both versions of Rita could more strongly and richly have approached a power similar to that of Shaw’s work in its day. What if, for instance, Rita had retained her original costuming and hairstyle after her transition as a serious student of literature was complete? Had the film expressed the full courage of its own thematic convictions, it might have suggested that intelligence and learning are not limited to those who display the outward signs. At the same time, as well, we might question Russell’s adherence to the male tutor/female pupil model in Pygmalion. What if he had chosen to explore the relationship between two women of differing classes and levels of education as tutor and student? Positioning a woman to intervene in authoring or revising institutional discourse could conceivably have prompted a deeper, more complicated and nuanced look into the possibilities and challenges inherent in female negotiation and struggle with patriarchal cultural authority. Early in the play and film, Rita announces that her favorite novel is Rubyfruit Jungle. So strongly does the novel speak to her that she has changed her name from Susan in honor of its author, Rita Mae Brown – a woman who fought against numerous barriers in her radical feminism and in her assertion of sexual freedom as a lesbian. Russell failed to mine the potential implications of his own intriguing allusion – whether in allowing Rita’s larger politicization, beyond seeking freedom and choice for herself alone; in exploring her degree of solidarity with other women, particularly those working-class women who are her friends and who seek transformation at the beauty parlor where she works; or in questioning her own sexual orientation. Such lost opportunities define Educating Rita as most conventional in expressing feminist issues of its day – when feminism was defined largely in terms of white and/or middle-class women. While, to be sure, Russell as an artist should certainly be seen as free to have chosen those questions that would and would not inform his project, the potential for a more radical intervention, like that of Shaw, is undeniable. In the film adaptation – for all of its strengths – one stylistic choice continues to nag and also situates the film firmly within cinematic convention insofar as female representation is concerned. Whether because Julie Walters was perceived as too old to play the twenty-six-year-old Rita

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onscreen or was viewed as not quite pretty enough a female object in the grand screen tradition, her close-ups were consistently shot with soft-focus effects, creating an odd spatial incongruity, especially in dialogue sequences with Frank, who was photographed without these same techniques. The soft-focus feminism of Rita’s film adaptation serves as an unwitting reminder that, regardless of content or stated themes, the “Pygmalion effect” remains in place within this male-driven production and within the larger male-dominated film industry that – to greater or lesser degrees – continues to sculpt woman as “an illusion cut to the measure of [male] desire,” as Laura Mulvey so famously observed.69 While not as extreme as the alterations imposed on productions of Pygmalion, this cinematic choice – in a most subtle, perhaps barely discernable way – mutes, modifies, and softens the proclaimed themes of freedom and choice and, in its own way, contributes to a lingering sense of female displacement. Notes 1. George Bernard Shaw, “Pygmalion,” in Bernard Shaw: Complete Plays with Prefaces, vol. i (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1962): 271. 2. Willy Russell, Educating Rita: A Comedy (New York: Samuel French, 1981): 33. 3. Ibid., 35. 4. Laura Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold: Remaking La Femme Nikita,” Camera Obscura, 16.2 (2001): 166. 5. Russell, Educating Rita: 5. 6. Ibid., 9. 7. Vicki R. Kennell, “Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge Between the Centuries,” SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, 25 (2005): 76. 8. Russell, Educating Rita: 35. 9. Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold”: 166. 10. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 286. 11. Dudley Andrew, Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford University Press, 1984): 99. 12. Although it would be impossible to provide an exhaustive list of film adaptations, the most frequently cited as direct adaptations include Pygmalion (1938, adapted by Shaw), My Fair Lady (George Cukor’s 1964 musical), Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall, 1990), and She’s All That (Robert Iscove, 1999). Among those films often cited as indirect versions of the Pygmalion story are Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo (1958), The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975; Frank Oz, 2004), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz, 1981, adapted from the John Fowles novel), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982, adapted from the Philip K. Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Trading Places (John Landis, 1983), The Little Drummer Girl (George Roy Hill, 1984, adapted from the John le Carré novel), La Femme Nikita (Luc Bresson, 1990), Point of No Return (John Badham,

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1993), Mighty Aphrodite (Woody Allen, 1995), and Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007, adapted from the Ian McEwan novel). For a more extensive list of film and literary adaptations, see Grindstaff, “The Pygmalion Tale Retold,” Kennell, “Pygmalion as Narrative Bridge,” and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php? title=Pygmalion_(mythology). 13. Jane O’Sullivan, “Virtual Metamorphoses: Cosmetic and Cybernetic Revisions of Pygmalion’s ‘Living Doll’,” Arethusa, 41.1 (2008): 134. 14. Russell, Educating Rita: 11. 15. Ibid., 17. 16. Russell, Educating Rita: 1. On his website, Russell identifies the setting as Liverpool (www.willyrussell.com/rita2.html). 17. Educating Rita departs from patterns common to so many Hollywood films of the period that simultaneously celebrate and undermine female autonomy in narratives that expose limitations of the “new,” liberated woman and position her as a threat to individual men and the patriarchal institutions they uphold, most particularly branches of the law (see Cynthia Lucia, Framing Female Lawyers: Women on Trial in Film [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005] and Yvonne Tasker, Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema [London and New York: Routledge, 1998].) 18. Russell, Educating Rita: 44. 19. Ibid., 51. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 9. 22. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 269. 23. Ibid., 275. 24. Ibid., 221. 25. Ibid., 225. 26. Ibid., 256. 27. Ibid., 256–257. 28. Ibid., 257. 29. Ibid., 270. 30. Shaw explores responses to changing conventions through the character of Clara in Pygmalion. 31. Russell, Educating Rita: 25. 32. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 274. 33. Ibid., 279. 34. Russell, Educating Rita: 32. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. Ibid. 37. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book 10, accessed online at Poetry Archive (www. poetry-archive.com/o/pygmalion_and_the_statue.html). 38. Russell, Educating Rita: 26. 39. Ibid., 30. 40. Ibid., 17. 41. Ibid., 26.

Educating Rita and the Pygmalion effect 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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Ibid., 18. Ibid., 54. Ovid, Metamorphoses. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 281. L. W. Conolly, “Introduction,” in Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw (London: Methuen Drama, 2008): xxv. Ibid., xxv–xxvi. Ibid., xxv. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 281–282. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxxiv–xxxv. Ibid., xxxv. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 282. Ibid., 284. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxxv–xxxvii. Although women were attending medical schools as early as 1910 and were accepted into other educational institutions, it was not until 1918 that firstwave feminists in the UK succeeded in winning voting rights for female property owners aged twenty-nine or older, and not until 1928 that all women over twentyone were granted suffrage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-wave_feminism). Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 271. Ibid., 279. Ibid., 286. Conolly, “Introduction”: xxvii. Ibid., 128. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., xxviii. Ibid., xxxviii. Shaw, “Pygmalion”: 278–279. Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: Random House, 1981): 35. Russell, Educating Rita: 42. An entire essay could and should be written on the many literary allusions in Educating Rita and how they function in both the play and the film. Interestingly, in his review of the film, Roger Ebert aptly observes: “If only I’d been able to believe they were actually reading the books, then everything else would have fallen into place. But I didn’t believe it.” As a result, he explains that what “might have been a charming human comedy, disintegrated into a forced march through a formula relationship.” (http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/ pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19831028/REVIEWS/310280301/1023). While the film has its wonderful moments, I would tend to agree with Ebert that the majority of literary references seem gratuitous rather than thematically integrated. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 6th edn., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004): 847.

chapter 11

The madness of Susan Traherne: adapting David Hare’s Plenty Tiffany Gilbert

Complaining about the film adaptation of his novel, Victor Mehta, protagonist of David Hare’s play A Map of the World, takes a jab at the movie industry’s baldly economic motives and the consequent failure of his original work’s moral premise to translate to the screen: “A moral story has been reduced to the status of a romance, transformed to a vulgar medium and traduced. Very well. It is what one expects. One looks to the cinema for money, not for enlightenment. And to be fair, the money has arrived.”1 Mehta’s objection raises critical questions about film adaptation, which is often assumed to be transactional in nature, faithful in execution, and subservient to the source text. Significantly, as Hare’s mouthpiece, Mehta further alludes to the limitations of the cinematic form to map out the subtle nuances of political or moral arguments. Such concerns about adaptation would inevitably occur to David Hare, who, in addition to being a renowned dramatist, is a celebrated screenwriter as well. His screenplays for Josephine Hart’s novel Damage, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and, recently, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, for which he was nominated for a 2008 Academy Award, like his stage plays, often deal with men and women in crisis, the limitations of faith, the perils of complacency, and personal and political hypocrisy. So much of the tension in his writing lies not in the spectacle of the breakdown itself, but in the tentacular reach of the fallout. Hare’s fixations with the concentricity of individual action (or non-action) coalesce in each of these films. Damage (1992), as Hart’s title suggests, concerns the collateral impact of an MP’s obsessive affair with his son’s fiancée as it radiates outwardly from his family and the halls of government. For The Hours (2002), Hare’s screenplay deftly measures the psychological “burn radius” of Cunningham’s devastating narrative. United across time and space by the figure of Virginia Woolf’s titular heroine, Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours tracks the lives of three women, Woolf included, along a continuum of personal 216

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suffering and dissatisfaction. Approaching Schlink’s The Reader (2008), Hare intimates in a column for the Guardian, was a considerably more delicate enterprise. Opening “a new field of inquiry” for portraying the Holocaust’s aftermath, The Reader, he explains, “[undertakes] a more farreaching exploration of the painful and difficult process we all now know under the name of truth and reconciliation.”2 The Reader, which centers on the sexual relationship between a young man and an older German woman for whom he reads books, as well as her past life as a Nazi guard at a concentration camp, explores the intersections of personal guilt and national trauma. While divergent in scope and subject, these adaptations reveal a consistent fascination with the push-pull between the political and the personal Hare honed in his 1978 play, Plenty, and in its screenplay. In a 2007 interview with Richard Boon about his experiences in the cinema and about his works on film, David Hare does not equivocate: I hate them. I just hate them. And I hate doing them, purely because I cannot judge them . . . When people ask me, “Do you like the film of Plenty?,” which I guess is the most successful film adaptation of a play of mine, I really cannot say. I cannot tell what it is, because in my mind it is still conceived as a play and all the choices I made about how to write it as a play get in the way of my understanding of what it is as a movie.3

Complicating our understanding of Plenty as a play and as a film is Hare’s technique, argues John Russell Brown. “Hare [uses] modern technology to control attention, plucking what he chooses from [his heroine] Susan’s individual history and from the real history of a world at war and peace, as if he were a film-maker,” Brown explains. “In its playing with place and time, Plenty was the most filmic of Hare’s plays to date, but nevertheless it was still conceived for theatrical immediacy in performance.”4 Whereas he observes a combination of theatrical and filmic techniques in Plenty, Hare’s distinction between the play and movie reinforces a binary that maintains generic difference. His uncertainty about his filmed plays conjures up discussions about fidelity and media specificity that have long preoccupied adaptation scholars. In Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Kamilla Elliott stridently suggests that adaptation commits two “heresies.” First, she avers, the practice violates ostensibly rigid assumptions that words and images cannot be translated into forms or media apart from their original contexts. Once words and images are transformed into a new product, she goes on to say, the adaptation itself is guilty of another heresy. Adaptation proves “that form separates from content – that the characters, plots, theories, and

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rhetoric of a novel distill to content apart from form and transfer into the form of film.”5 In other words, the relationship between form and content is no longer sacrosanct and can be replicated in any medium. Robert Stam’s analysis, meanwhile, hits closer to home for my purposes. Pondering an author’s relation to the self-adapted work, he asks: The question of fidelity also ignores the wider question of fidelity to what? . . . In the cases where an author, for example Nabokov, writes a screenplay for his own novel, should the filmmaker be faithful to the novel or the screenplay? What about cases where a novelist/filmmaker, for example the Senegalese novelist/filmmaker Sembène in Xala, is “unfaithful” to his own novel?6

Pressing Stam’s analogy further, what does it mean for an author to take liberties with his own work? Notwithstanding (or because of) Hare’s own confusion, Plenty presents an intriguing test case for evaluating authorial “infidelity.” Capitalizing on Meryl Streep’s emerging stardom in the early 1980s, Fred Schepisi’s 1985 film adaptation, to paraphrase the fictional Victor Mehta, barters away morals for romance. In the play, which won the 1982–1983 New York Drama Critics’ Circle award and was nominated for a slew of Tony awards that season, Hare politicizes Susan Traherne’s solipsism to critique Britain’s enervated moral and cultural authority at the end of the Second World War. However, Hare’s leftist arguments fail to translate on screen, as the plenitude of Streep’s star image in the film eclipses the sweeping arc of his dramaturgy.

“Epic writing” for the stage and screen As a playwright, David Hare has written some of the most controversial and politically charged dramas to emerge from Britain, many of which specifically engage his objections to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatism of the 1970s and the trajectory of postwar British politics and culture more broadly. In Plenty, he focuses his critiques of the British government in the character of Susan Traherne, a former member of the Resistance during the Second World War, who emotionally lacerates herself with the broken shards of wartime idealism in a postwar Britain flush with commerce and new visions of conquest. As the third installment in what Hare has called his “history plays,” and what some have suggested is the apogee of Hare’s evolving political voice of the seventies, Plenty operates at the intersection of the personal and the historical, the individual and the

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institutional. Susan’s emotional breakdown takes place against the backdrop of the national pomp of the Festival of Britain and embarrassment over the Suez Crisis. She – and her psychosis – ostensibly function as a kind of (dis)connective tissue between competing realities, between the world as it is and her perceptions of it. Nevertheless, the madness of Susan Traherne, Hare insists, should not solely be viewed as an individual or clinical phenomenon. Speaking of her decline and other protagonists on the precipice of insanity, he offers: I take a figure who says, “This is not right. This should not be so,” and I try to write about the cost of that way of life. I suppose that what the plays conclude – certainly Plenty does – is that not to be able to give your consent to a society will drive you mad, but, on the other hand, to consent will mean to acquiesce in the most appalling lassitude. The choice tends to be dramatized within the plays as isolation – sometimes madness – or the most ignominious absorption.7

With Plenty, Hare perfected what he and contemporary Howard Brenton dubbed “British epic theater.” Simply put, this innovative dramaturgy presents the lives of men and women through and across many scenes, or “windows,” to articulate a core message.8 This episodic approach allows Hare to hone in on the central drama, to magnify characters’ dilemmas without over-explaining or simplifying the play’s argument. Hare deliberately leaves the space between “windows” open and ambiguous, forcing the audience to grapple with an incomplete – sometimes incoherent – narrative. “The overall effect, crudely,” Boon summarizes, “is to make audiences work; to require them to fill the gaps themselves, thereby engaging with the play with a profound and – crucially – critical concentration.”9 Yet, Hare denies his audience the luxury of contemplation. “The transitions from scene to scene should be as quick as possible,” he advises in Writing Left-Handed, a compilation of reflective essays devoted to the craft as well as the politics of playwriting. “If the director has to choose between amplifying the design or hastening it, he should always opt for speed.”10 Velocity characterizes the cinematic rendering of Plenty, as Fred Schepisi whisks viewers from scene to scene with little or no indication about the passage of time or setting. While epic theatre accelerates on the stage, on screen it takes on the ethereal quality of dreams. Again, talking with Richard Boon, Hare reflects: “I think I have always had a strange attitude about film, which is that I have always thought it was the medium you dreamed in. What that meant: I have tried to make films that had the intensity of a dream.”11 Hare exploits the liminal quality of dreams in order to examine

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personal and political history nonlinearly. His work reminds us that history operates outside the boundaries of what is known, and presses us to contemplate what might have or should have been.12 In Plenty, this kind of cultural or historical “schizophrenia” manifests itself in the fragmented structure and style, as well as in the emotional deterioration of Susan Traherne. Apropos Susan’s tenuous contact with reality, the damage caused by living in dreams finds jagged expression in the dramatic structure of Plenty. Moving peripatetically across time from war zones in 1940s France to London in the early 1960s, the play also travels in and out of Susan’s consciousness. Beginning in 1962, the stage version opens at the end of a domestic skirmish in which Brock lies naked, bleeding, and unconscious on a wooden floor; while Susan, his wife, and her friend, Alice, talk nonchalantly about sweet-and-sour prawns and Susan’s decision to leave her marriage: “Tell him I left with nothing that was his. I just walked out on him. Everything to go.”13 The second scene, without warning, follows Susan to France where twenty years earlier, as a seventeen-year-old supply courier for the Resistance, she meets another secret agent, Lazar (Illustration 11.1). Trying hard to appear aloof and in control of the drop, she reminds Lazar of the rules of engagement: susan: Cafes are bad meeting places, much less safe than they seem. Don’t go near Bourges, it’s very bad for us. Don’t carry anything in toothpaste tubes, it’s become the first place they look. Don’t laugh too much. An Englishman’s laugh, it just doesn’t sound the same. Are they still teaching you to broadcast from the lavatory? lazar: Yes.

11.1 Susan (Meryl Streep) meets Lazar (Sam Neill) on an undercover mission in France, the man she then hopelessly yearns after the rest of her life.

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susan: Well don’t. And don’t hide your receiver in the cistern, the whole dodge is badly out of date. The Gestapo have been crashing into lavatories for a full two months. Never take the valley road beyond Poitiers, I’ll show you a side-road.14

Despite her nonchalance, Susan is scared to death of dying on the field or, worse, in a concentration camp. Susan turns to Lazar and starts crying. To comfort her, Lazar relies on the cold, simple logic of physics: “Did you know . . . did you know sound waves never die? So every noise we make goes into the sky. And there is a place somewhere in the corner of the universe where all the babble of the world is kept.”15 But, as Susan’s last line of the scene reminds us, this is not a moment for intimacy, in spite of her clearly desperate need for it: “I don’t know your name.”16 The abruptness with which the scene ends is jarring. Lazar’s anonymity at this juncture of the play is critical, for it denies closure and imparts to him a heroic mystery that haunts Susan – à la Proust’s Madeleine – in the years following the war’s end. With these two scenes – one set in the present, the other in the past – Hare maps out the complex, ever-shifting psychological and political terrain on which Susan attempts to gain a secure foothold. Accordingly, in the third scene, the drama propels us forward in time from 1943 to 1947, and from France to Belgium, where Susan arrives at the British Embassy in Brussels to make arrangements to transport her lover’s dead body back to his family in England. With Lazar, ostensibly ensconced in memory, and Tony, her Resistance comrade, now deceased, Susan’s wartime attachments appear to have dissolved. At the Embassy, she meets Raymond Brock, undersecretary to Leonard Darwin, a career diplomat and devoted servant of the Empire. The minutiae of transporting Tony’s body settled, the conversation between Brock, Darwin, and Susan turns to the prospect of a “New Europe.” darwin: Reconstruction. Massive. Massive work of reconstruction. Jobs. Ideals. Marvellous. Marvellous time to be alive in Europe. No end of it. Roads to be built. People to be educated. Land to be tilled. Lots to get on with . . . Have another gin. susan: No thanks. darwin: The diplomat’s eye is the clearest in the world. Seen from Djakarta this continent looks so old, so beautiful. We don’t realize what we have in our hands.17

The clarity with which Darwin (whose evocative surname later comes to symbolize a tragic irony about the Empire’s future) sees the economic and commercial opportunities afforded by the devastation opposes Susan’s hazy

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idealism and nostalgic yearning for her wartime adventures. However, the play is no mere polemic, spinning its wheels with circuitous ideological arguments. With these three sequences, Hare adumbrates the tangled nexus of personal, historical, and institutional exigency that supplies the play its tension and ambiguity.

Fucking people up Susan Traherne is a difficult character with whom to sympathize; indeed, she is capable of causing extraordinary emotional “collateral damage.” Even at their first meeting, Brock is perceptive enough to question the sincerity of Susan’s grief over Tony’s passing and perhaps over the end of the war itself: “You don’t think you wear your suffering a little heavily?”18 To be sure, Susan wears her suffering like a mantle of ice, and maintains a frigid air of detachment even in her closest relationships. Months later, with Brock as her lover, Susan still resists committing to her relationship as well as to the present. Brock’s apathy toward his postwar life as a bureaucrat – “[W]hat other world do I have?” – counters Susan’s nostalgia for the past: For instance, there was a man in France. His code name was Lazar. I’d been there a year I suppose and one night I had to see him on his way. He just dropped out of the sky. An agent. He was lost. I was trying to be blasé, trying to be tough, all the usual stuff – irony, hardness, cleverness, wit – and then suddenly I began to cry. On to the shoulder of a man I’d never met before. But not a day goes by without my wondering where he is.19

The suddenness of Lazar’s arrival and departure in Susan’s life contributes to a persistent sense of loss and dislocation that she tries later to resolve through motherhood. She approaches Mick, a friend of Alice’s, at the Festival of Britain to proposition him about being, in effect, a sperm donor: “I’m looking for a father. I want to have a child.”20 She counts on their brief acquaintance and class differences to foreclose the possibility of any lasting intimacies; for Susan, this is nothing more than a business transaction. Mick feels “lucky to be asked,” but wonders why Susan has not sought a more suitable lover. susan: I’m afraid I’m rather strong-minded, as you know, and so with them I usually feel I’m holding myself in for fear of literally blowing them out of the room. They are kind, they are able, but I don’t see . . . why I should have to compromise, why I should have to make some sad and decorous marriage just to have a child. I don’t see why any woman should have to do that.21

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Mounted to celebrate a postwar British renaissance, the Festival of Britain is an ironic setting for a seduction. After several encounters, Susan ultimately fails to conceive a child with Mick. Months later on New Year’s Eve, when he visits the apartment she shares with Alice, Susan becomes annoyed. Her indifference infuriates Mick, who calls her out on cruelty and hardness: “You fuck people up. This little tart [Alice] and her string of married men, all fucked up, all fucking ruined by this tart. And you . . . and you . . . [turning to Susan] She is actually mad.”22 Firing a revolver into the air, Susan carries out her threat of “blowing people away.”

“Peace and plenty” In Plenty, the historical and the personal converge in what Alice describes as Susan’s “psychiatric cabaret.”23 Susan’s emotional decline tracks the gradual erosion of Britain’s moral and political standing in the world. Her romantic optimism and hopes for a “better” Britain, cultivated during her stint as a member of the Resistance and burnished in the image of Lazar, diminish as she endures the daily grind as a copy writer in an advertising firm. “This is hell . . . I am living in hell,” she remarks to Alice as she struggles to find the language to sell a pair of shoes (Illustration 11.2).24 The “lies” that once sustained her in France no longer suffice, as to survive in Darwin’s New Europe requires her to “[shut] my eyes and [imagine] what it’s like to be very, very stupid. This is all the future holds for any of us. We will spend the next twenty years of our lives pretending to be thick.”25 Susan’s prophecy about the future, however, is not entirely off the mark. Britain has not realized the ideals invoked in wartime rhetoric; indeed, those ideals have

11.2 Susan strikes up a friendship with the even more unconventional Alice (Tracey Ullman).

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been swept away with the debris still littering the streets from the bombing campaigns over London. The ensuing years of peace, flush with money and privilege after her marriage to Brock, take their toll on Susan. Abruptly, after the showdown between Susan and Mick in 1952, the play picks up in 1956 at the elegant diplomat’s residence Susan shares with Brock. The personal and the historical come together again as Susan and Brock host a reception for the Burmese representative Mr. Aung and his wife in the immediate aftermath of the Suez Canal debacle. Darwin’s late arrival to dinner uncorks tensions that have been bottled up for too long. Hare juxtaposes the elaborate dinner and Darwin’s political embarrassment in Susan’s ceaseless chatter: “Nobody will say ‘blunder’ or ‘folly’ or ‘fiasco.’ Nobody will say ‘international laughing stock.’ You are among friends, Leonard. I will rustle up some food . . . Nobody will say ‘death-rattle of the ruling class.’ We have stuck our lips together with marron glacé. I hope you understand.”26 But Susan cannot stop; as with Lazar on the field, she must talk. The decadence of the diplomatic feast amplifies the utter emptiness in her life. She fills the void with incoherent babble about the war days: susan: Of course, we were comparatively welcome, not always ecstatic, not the Gaullists, of course, but by and large we did make it our business to land in countries where we were wanted. Certainly the men were. I mean, some of the relationships, I can’t tell you. I remember a colleague telling me of the heat, of the smell of a particular young girl, the hot wet smell, he said. Nothing since. Nothing since then.27

Susan’s outburst infuriates Brock, who, for the first time in the play, expresses his own rage: “Please can you stop, can you stop fucking talking for five minutes on end.”28 Susan’s “cabaret” comes to an end. As part of her closing act, she offers, in effect, an inventory of the food in the house – chicken, pickles, tomato, pheasants, twelve bottles of claret – throwing in her guests’ faces the “plenty” that has ruined everything.

“Which is the braver?” By Easter 1962, the “New Europe” Darwin once envisioned fails to take hold in the decades following the war. Susan’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic and difficult to hide. Darwin dies, discredited and shunned for speaking out against Suez, and Brock, encouraged to resign from diplomatic service because of Susan, finds work in the insurance industry. Susan takes out her rage against the house, viewing it as a symbol

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of failure, as a repository of useless stuff: “Cutlery, crockery, lampshades and books, books. Encyclopedias. Clutter. Meaningless. A universe of things. Mosquito nets, golf clubs, photographs. China. Marble. Glass. Mementoes in stone. What is this shit? What are these God-forsaken bloody awful things?”29 Surveying the damage strewn about the house, Brock asks the question that has formed the basis of Hare’s polemic: “Which is the braver? To live as I do? Or never, ever face life like you?”30 The answer may lie with Charleson, the chief clerk of the Foreign Office. Confronting him about Brock’s future in the diplomatic service, Susan, whose nervous breakdowns may be her only form of agency, meets her match. susan: Sir Andrew, do you never find it in yourself to despise a profession in which nobody may speak their mind? charleson: That is the nature of the service, Mrs. Brock. It is called diplomacy. And in its practice the English lead the world. The irony is this: we had an empire to administer, there were six hundred of us in this place. Now it’s to be dismantled and there are six thousand. As our power declines, the fight among us for access to that power becomes a little more urgent, a little uglier perhaps. As our influence wanes, as our empire collapses, there is little to believe in. Behavior is all.31

Although he appears late in the action, Charleson’s speech unsentimentally assesses the play’s political and moral conditions: in the face of defeat, England’s stiff upper lip must never quiver. Susan’s misbehavior may be interpreted as a refusal to accept the terms of this faithless postwar reality. Unfortunately, her outbursts never lead to any lasting external change; they become increasingly self-destructive. Susan’s martyrdom for an ideal that never existed is not easily admired. But Hare does not condemn her outright. For Susan is not the only casualty of peace – Lazar, too, has capitulated to the demands of normalcy. Having tracked Susan down after hearing a radio interview about her exploits in the war, Lazar admits, “I don’t know what I’d expected . . . What I’d hoped for, at the time I returned. Some sort of edge to the life that I lead. Some sort of feeling their death was worthwhile. Some day I must tell you. I don’t feel I’ve done well. I gave in. Always. All along the line. Suburb. Wife. Hell. I work in a corporate bureaucracy as well.”32 They meet in a rented room and make love in a pointless effort to reassure themselves of the meaning of it all. Like Susan, Lazar is disillusioned, disappointed with the predictable reality of his unheroic life after the war. High on marijuana, Susan is oblivious to Lazar’s plight and subsequent exit. In her daze, she mentally drifts to the French countryside, where, after the war, she heartily embraced the future’s possibilities.

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In one of the play’s most significant shifts or “windows,” Hare juxtaposes Susan’s emotional ennui in the present with her nostalgic yearnings for the past. The darkness of the anonymous rooming house of 1962 yields to a bright August afternoon in 1944. Reaching the top of a hill, a nineteen-yearold Susan encounters an old French farmer. Her optimism is slightly annoying to the farmer, who is unmoved by the celebrations in the street over the Allied forces’ victory. frenchman: Myself I work. A farmer. Like any other day. The Frenchman works or starves. He is the piss. The shit. The lowest of the low. susan: Look. They’re lighting fires in the square. And children . . . coming out with burning sticks. [Pause] Have you seen anything as beautiful as this?33

The scene ends with Susan descending the hill with the farmer. However, Hare closes this “window” on an ironic note. Well aware of her postwar reality, Susan’s ebullience and sense of anticipation, at this stage, borders on the tragic. She tells the old man, “[T]hings will quickly change. We have grown up. We will improve our world . . . There will be days and days and days like this.”34 Sadly, as we know, the changes that come are not the kind she imagines.

“Clouds across a landscape”: Meryl Streep and Plenty (1985) By the time she starred in Fred Schepisi’s film version of Plenty, Meryl Streep had established herself as one of the premier actresses of her generation. Winning Academy Awards for her performances in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), Streep forged a persona of stalwart long-suffering and nobility in such films of the 1980s as The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), Silkwood (1983), and Out of Africa, which was also released in 1985. Film critic Roger Ebert lauds her performance as Susan Traherne: [I]t is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm. Susan is often very pleasant to be around, for the other characters in Plenty, and when she is letting herself lose control, she doesn’t do it in the style of patented movie mad scenes in which eyes roll and teeth are bared. She does it with an almost winsome urgency.35

New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby disagrees. Diagnosing Susan’s malaise as a “terminal case of ineffable feelings,” Canby seems to mourn the loss of rolling eyes and bared teeth, or rather a lack of dynamism, in Streep’s interpretation. “Most of the time,” he writes, “Susan Traherne is simply unbelievable – a woman of no easily identifiable background and of no

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recognizable intelligence or sensitivity. Miss Streep’s performance doesn’t help. She does all the right things technically, including her English accent, but the character remains as chilly and distant as the North Pole.”36 To her credit, Streep brings to the part of Susan Traherne a frosty detachment that complements the film’s dramatic structure and its interpersonal tensions. In his commentary for the DVD release of Plenty, Schepisi praises Streep’s talents to telegraph emotions transparently, unfiltered like “clouds across a landscape.”37 Her inscrutability is at once frustrating and entrancing. One only has to recall John Fowles’s description of Sarah Woodruff, his heroine in the best-selling novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Streep’s cinematic alter ego in Karel Reisz’s film version, to appreciate Streep’s elusive allure: “It was an unforgettable face, and a tragic face. Its sorrow welled out of it as purely, naturally and unstoppably as water out of a woodland spring. There was no artifice there, no hypocrisy, no hysteria, no mask; and above all, no sign of madness. The madness was in the empty sea, the empty horizon, the lack of reason for such sorrow.”38 Over the past three decades, she has honed her acting powers, earning a reputation for adapting seamlessly, like water, to her performative context and to the psychological contours of the character she portrays. Plenty coincides with another significant development in Streep’s impressive filmography. In 1985, her performance as Karen Blixen in Sydney Pollack’s film Out of Africa dazzled critics and audiences across the world. The film documents the life of Danish author Isak Dinesen (Blixen’s pseudonym) and the years she spent in Kenya managing a coffee plantation. Streep’s sonorous voice-over, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” introduces Pollack’s sweeping vision of Dinesen’s romance with the continent and with itinerant explorer Denys Finch-Hatton, played by Robert Redford.39 Unlike Plenty, which bears out Hare’s oppositional politics, Out of Africa is unencumbered with ideology – its origins are autobiographical, not polemical. Karen Blixen’s loveless marriage to her Swedish cousin, his bout of syphilis as a result of his infidelities, the struggles to capitalize on her coffee investment, not to mention her relationship with the restless Finch-Hatton, appeal more broadly as cinematic subjects. Meanwhile, Susan Traherne remains a cipher. We know nothing about her past, except for her war experience in France; we hardly know her reasons for clinging to the “idea” of Lazar long after their separation. Why is Susan, more than Brock, Alice, or any of her acquaintances, impacted by the nation’s postwar scramble to reconstitute itself and its deteriorating global

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image? Why does her “resistance” to the plenty she abhors take the form of a psychological breakdown and not some other kind of concrete political action? Hare deliberately leaves us in the dark. For Yoo Kim, assessing the ideological implications of affluence in the play, Susan’s inscrutability is a “virtue,” a productive conceit that enables Hare to dismantle the “relationships between individual and society, theory and practice, and history and myth.”40 If Susan’s anonymity facilitates Hare’s theatrical assault on Thatcherism and dissatisfaction with the status quo in Britain, then Streep’s recognized presence in Schepisi’s Plenty may function as an indirect repudiation of Reagan-era excess, “compassionate conservatism,” and Cold War saber-rattling with the Soviet Union. In contrast, Out of Africa literally and figuratively removes us far away from the geopolitical “minefields” then exploding in both Britain and America. And, even if the film ends with Finch-Hatton’s tragic death in a plane crash and Blixen’s eventual return to Denmark, it satisfies viewers’ needs for grand romance, nostalgia for a time uncomplicated by contemporary East-West tensions, and a refuge from the quotidian in exotic locales. To put it more succinctly, Out of Africa is epic cinema for the masses. Meryl Streep may be America’s most acclaimed actress since Katharine Hepburn; however, it bears remembering that Hare dedicates the stage version of Plenty to Canadian actress Kate Nelligan, who debuted the role of Susan Traherne at London’s Lyttleton Theatre in 1978. Hare praises Nelligan in an interview with his editors at Faber and Faber for “[having] not just a faultless ear for my lines, but a very extraordinary tension in her physicality as well. This made her the near-perfect player of my work. She was always compelling. The fact she was Canadian also gave her an edge in playing these very English plays.”41 Englishness not only sets the tone of Plenty, but also delivers the play’s throb and pulse. Indeed, in Writing LeftHanded, Hare stresses to actors performing the play outside of Britain to remember, “Englishness is of the essence.”42 If we take Hare at his word, Englishness does not just function as an accessory; it becomes the centerpiece of an elaborate philosophical and existential discussion that underwrites the play’s drama: how does Englishness survive war? What is the status of Englishness now that the Empire is lost? Once Streep assumes the role of Susan, these questions become more vexed. When Plenty becomes a vehicle for her, it inevitably loses some of its political edge. In what appears to be a calculated decision to profit from her burgeoning celebrity at the time, Englishness cedes theatrical and cultural “authority” to the Hollywood fame machine. Furthermore, casting Streep – the sole American – among Britain’s

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legendary and rising stars like John Gielgud, Ian McKellan, Charles Dance, Tracey Ullman, and musician-turned-actor Sting reinforces Susan’s solipsism, and ultimately moves the play’s center of gravity away from the political to the personal.

Schepisi’s “cinematic” cabaret With the possible exceptions of Roxanne (1987), a modern update of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, and Six Degrees of Separation (1993), based on John Guare’s stage play about a con artist who infiltrates New York high society by pretending to be Sidney Poitier’s son, Plenty may well be Australian director Fred Schepisi’s most successful film. Lacking an extensive filmography, Schepisi nevertheless impressed Hare, who “could tell Fred’s work was brilliantly composed – you know, that singular use of the anamorphic lens which only Fred understands – and the dynamic width of the screen; he loves and understands composition.”43 In Plenty, Schepisi’s cinematographic intelligence is apparent, and confirms Richard Eyre’s assertion that Hare “has the pen of a polemicist, but the soul of a romantic.”44 To this end, the film opens with the propitious meeting between Susan and Lazar (Sam Neill) in the French countryside. In a move that appears to resolve the disjointed chronology and bypass the images of shattered domesticity featured in the source text, this sequence likewise conveys Susan’s anxieties about the war and Lazar’s mysteriousness. The need for intimacy and a refuge from the looming threat of death or capture remain palpable in their brief exchanges. Unlike the play, the scene does not end with Lazar’s anonymity. Instead, the misty, indifferent field gives way to Susan’s rented flat in a nearby town, where Susan and Lazar find comfort in each other, making love without preamble or pretense; they both know this is a temporary respite from their dangerous work as Resistance fighters. And, indeed, the next morning the hazards of war resurface in the town’s center as Susan shops for groceries. Without warning, Nazi soldiers shoot down a bicyclist, while locals gather at an outside cafe. They remain nonplussed; war, like their coffee, has become part of a daily routine. Meanwhile, alone in her flat, Lazar continues his spy work, receiving telegraph messages about his mission. He tidies up the room and, on his way out, leaves a pair of propeller cufflinks on the mantle, a kind of “calling card” that will become more significant as the film progresses. In this wartime reality, there is no time for farewells. As suddenly as he enters her

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life, Lazar exits: Susan catches a brief glimpse of the covert agent as he pedals out of town and heads toward his next destination. The insertion of these sequences is not indicated in the play, but they shore up the romantic foundations of Susan’s nostalgia and of the film itself. As a consequence, though, Hare’s biting polemic recedes behind the more visible depictions of personal angst and desperation. Even the play’s historical consciousness yields to the exigencies of cinematic effect. In a significant departure from the play’s historical setting, the 1951 Festival of Britain, site of Susan’s propositioning of Mick, undergoes a temporal and cultural transformation, and becomes instead the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in the film. There is no rationale for the swap, unless we are supposed to equate monarchy with maternity. If Queen Elizabeth’s surprising accession to the throne allayed fears over the continuity of the House of Windsor after the abdication of her uncle, King Edward VIII, then Susan’s desires for a child commingle anxieties over a purposeless present and optimism for an unknown future. Ultimately, the spectacle of the coronation itself is reduced to “white noise” on the television, which flickers in the background while Susan and Mick have sex on a living-room sofa. The implications of this change in venue from the festival to the coronation are telling. Described as a “tonic for the nation” by impresario Gerald Barry, the 1951 festival celebrated the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851.45 Focusing on the industrial redevelopment of urban and rural sectors, the event also signaled Britain’s post-Second World War recovery and the reconstitution of the national body politic. Advancing two years to the coronation for the film version, the emphases of Hare’s critique modulate away from the institutional to the individual. With this shift in chronology, Plenty appears less focused on articulating Hare’s objections to Thatcher’s conservative agenda and the direction of contemporary British politics. Rather, the play now seems (albeit conveniently) to ratify a feminist agenda then gaining momentum in the late seventies. Susan’s sudden maternal ambitions and plans “to go it alone” on the surface appear subversive in the face of traditional patriarchy; the queen, after all, now presides over the Commonwealth and a family dynasty. Reading Plenty in the context of its own production and performance history, Janelle Reinelt rationalizes “an alternative way of understanding the reception of Susan in London and New York . . . as a palimpsest of postwar womanhood intermingled with an emerging second wave feminism. Perhaps what could be an ambivalent lightning rod in England in 1978 was more acceptable in New York in the context of American feminism a year later.”46 In actuality, if the child were less of a “tonic” for Susan

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to help her acclimate to the reality of her postwar life, then perhaps we could judge her actions more generously. Her propositioning of Mick and denunciation of marriage may seem “feminist” in their rejection of heteronormative domesticity. Unfortunately, as with many of Susan’s actions and decisions, there is no method to the madness. These gestures, in the end, merely appear hollow and selfish. Such historical modifications notwithstanding, the visual and aural universe of Schepisi’s Plenty changes very little from scene to scene, reminding us that nothing really ever happens to Susan. Her meeting with Darwin at the British embassy in Brussels resembles a later appointment with Charleson at the Foreign Office. The repetition of certain sound effects, like the billowing of Lazar’s wind-blown parachute, the sheet that drapes Tony’s corpse in the hotel lobby, and the tablecloths at the coronation luncheon, aurally register her stagnant reality.47 Nowhere is Schepisi’s “redundant” approach more apt than in the scenes focusing on Susan and Lazar. Susan’s first encounter with Lazar mirrors her last at the end of the film. They meet at a nondescript boarding house on the coast, and, as before, make love without removing their clothes. This time, in a reversal of their previous dynamic, Lazar needs to talk about the compromises and accommodations he has made after the war. Schepisi takes advantage of the setting, shooting the scene quite a distance from the shore to convey a sense of personal and physical isolation; they are both, at this point in their lives, unmoored. Once again, as if from memory, Lazar clears the room of dirty glasses and ashtrays – the detritus of their affair – erasing evidence of his existence “so that nobody can ever tell [a fine undercover agent] was there.”48 It is a moving sequence, made all the more so by his discovery of the cufflinks he left behind all those years ago, now folded in a handkerchief in her purse. And, because we have been here before, we are just as “stuck” as Susan, which makes the panoramic depiction of her reverie on a French hilltop that closes the film at once brilliant and unsettling. Schepisi’s direction, however, keeps us from falling into the suffocating vortex of Susan’s despair. Just as his wide lens captures the breadth of Susan’s optimism for the future, it is also employed to represent the scope of her present suffering. For the film, Hare expands the play’s passing reference to Brock and Susan’s diplomatic tour in Iran. The action moves away, without warning, from the dinner debacle in London to the deserts of the Middle East. In Jordan, the location used to represent Iran, Schepisi exploits the country’s ancient architecture and topography to foreground the deterioration of modern personal relationships. These distinctions become unbearably clear when Alice visits Brock and Susan. The desert

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conveys both environmental and emotional aridity: Susan and Brock are as estranged as they ever were. When Alice walks through the spacious ruins of an amphitheatre, Brock and Susan, hiding behind sunglasses, wait silently in the confining backseat of a taxi. Later, overlooking an expansive vista dominated by the sun-bleached buildings, the trio enjoy afternoon tea. By all indications, they appear happy and comfortable with each other. However, forced conversations about Brock’s victory at Scrabble (“juxtapose” is the winning word) reveal otherwise. Susan, now heavily medicated, offers only the most half-hearted, perfunctory responses. Susan and Brock eventually return to England, but their marital “détente” disintegrates. Schepisi’s film picks up where the play begins, and “returns” to the site of the domestic squabble that greeted us at the start. Susan, in a frenzy of decluttering, plans to give the house she shares with Brock to Alice, who wants to open a halfway house for unwed mothers. “One small gesture,” she explains to him. She rationalizes her erratic behavior by invoking Brock’s denunciation of money as the source of all that is rotten in Britain. Unable to contain it any longer, Brock vents his rage at what he perceives – and has endured – as Susan’s titanic selfabsorption (Illustration 11.3). “You claim to be protecting some personal ideal, always at the cost of almost infinite pain to everyone around you. You are selfish, brutish, unkind . . . In the life you have lived, you have utterly failed in the very heart of your life. Admit that, and then you might really move on.” His words fail to penetrate. She reacts by throwing porcelain and slamming a door in his face, which lands squarely on his nose, knocking him unconscious. To ensure he does not recover in time to keep her from

11.3 Her marriage to Brock (Charles Dance) hits a crisis point when he refuses to let her demolish his home and career.

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leaving, she forces a Nembutal-laced glass of Scotch down his throat. Susan walks out on her London life and heads for the coast. The film ends as ambivalently as its dramatic counterpart. After the aforementioned final encounter between Susan and Lazar, Schepisi sweeps us back in time to the French countryside where she rhapsodized on the prospects for the future. The scene, lush with sunshine, offers a glittering coda to Susan’s wartime exploits. Yet, because Hare’s screenplay tilts the thematic focus to emphasize Susan’s personal travails, the impact here is less politically consequential than it is melodramatically palatable. Discussing his career with Richard Boon, David Hare may have appeared coy when he claimed not to know what Plenty is as a movie, yet there is an element of truth to his evasiveness. His throwback approach to the modern crises in national and political confidence that afflicted Britain in the years after the Suez disaster and into the late 1970s, and his use of history to rail against the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher, make Plenty one of the most significant theatrical works to emerge in the last forty years. In the transition from stage to screen, however, history yields to celebrity; medium trumps message. While Schepisi’s organization of physical and psychological landscapes opens up Hare’s emotionally contained script, Meryl Streep’s performance errs on distraction. Admired elsewhere for her chameleonic talents, Streep seems “negatively incapable” – to pun on Keats’s coinage, “negative capability” – of disappearing into the characterization of Susan Traherne. Watching Streep in Plenty, one never forgets the “act” – the well-studied accent, the arch mannerisms – her impersonation of Englishness. And, in some ways, Schepisi’s Plenty is also an impersonation, masterminded by Hare himself. Meryl Streep, hardly the Hollywood outsider, transforms Susan Traherne into a pathetic figure instead of a subversive one. Plenty, concludes Roger Ebert, “is finally not a statement about war, or foreign service, or the British middle class, but simply the story of this flawed woman who once lived intensely, and now feels that she is hardly living at all.”49 And therein lies the problem. Adapting to cinematic exigencies for their film, David Hare and Fred Schepisi ultimately engage in appeasement, not oppositional politics. Notes 1. David Hare, David Hare: Plays 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1997): 194. 2. David Hare, “Truth and Reconciliation,” Guardian, June 1, 2010, www.guard ian.co.uk/film/2008/dec/13/schlink-winslet-hare-reader.

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3. Richard Boon, “Hare on Film: An Interview,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare, ed. Richard Boon (Cambridge University Press, 2007): 175. This anthology of essays has been vital to my analysis of Plenty. Boon assembles a broad spectrum of recent scholarly considerations of Hare’s politics, dramaturgy, and screenwriting efforts. For more critical insight into the political implications of Hare’s stage plays, see Scott Fraser, A Politic Theatre: The Drama of David Hare (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1996); Judy Lee Oliva, David Hare: Theatricalizing Politics (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1990); Carol Homden, The Plays of David Hare (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Janelle G. Reinelt, After Brecht: British Epic Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). 4. John Russell Brown, “Playing with Place: Some Filmic Techniques in the Plays of David Hare,” in Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights, ed. Kimball King (New York: Routledge, 2001): 137. 5. Kamilla Elliott, Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 133. 6. Robert Stam and Alessandro Raengo, eds., Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005): 15. 7. Alison Summers, “David Hare’s Drama, 1970–81: An Interview,” Centennial Review, 36.2 (1992): 583–584. 8. Boon, “Keeping Turning Up: Hare’s Early Career,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare: 39. 9. Ibid., 38. 10. David Hare, Writing Left-Handed (London: Faber and Faber, 1991): 84. 11. Boon, “Hare on Film: An Interview”: 170. 12. Boon, “Keeping Turning Up”: 46. 13. David Hare, David Hare: Plays 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996): 379. 14. Ibid., 382. 15. Ibid., 388. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 398. 18. Ibid., 396. 19. Ibid., 411. 20. Ibid., 416. 21. Ibid., 416–417. 22. Ibid., 428. 23. Ibid., 437. 24. Ibid., 421. 25. Ibid., 422. 26. Ibid., 431. 27. Ibid., 438. 28. Ibid., 439. 29. Ibid., 467. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 458–459.

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Ibid., 474. Ibid., 476–477. Ibid., 477–478. Roger Ebert, “Plenty,” Chicago Sun Times, July 15, 2010, http://rogerebert.sun times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19850920/REVIEWS/509200303/1023. 36. Vincent Canby, “Plenty (1985),” New York Times, July 15, 2010, http://movies. nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9505E7D91739F93AA2575AC0A963948260. 37. Fred Schepisi, “Days of Plenty,” Plenty, Edward R. Pressman/RKO Pictures DVD, 2002. Unless indicated otherwise, all subsequent quotations are taken from Hare’s screenplay. 38. John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Boston: Little Brown, 1969): 15. 39. Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass (New York: Vintage, 1989): 2. 40. Yoo Kim, “Contesting the Ideology of Post-war ‘Affluence’: A Study of David Hare’s Plenty,” Journal of Modern British and American Drama, 19.1 (2006): 131. 41. Hare, David Hare: Plays 1: xiii. 42. Hare, Writing Left-Handed: 84. 43. Boon, “Hare on Film: An Interview”: 176. 44. Richard Eyre, “Directing Hare,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare: 148. 45. F. M. Leventhal, “‘A Tonic to the Nation’: The Festival of Britain, 1951,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, 27.3 (1995): 445–453. 46. Janelle Reinelt, “Performing Histories: Plenty and A Map of the World,” in The Cambridge Companion to David Hare: 206. In After Brecht: British Epic Theater, Reinelt also observes an unfortunate transformation in Susan Traherne in Schepisi’s film, citing the Iranian episode in which Susan is sedated as confirmation of her victimization. 47. Schepisi, “Days of Plenty,” Plenty, DVD. 48. Hare, David Hare: Plays 1: 475. 49. Roger Ebert, “Plenty,” Chicago Sun Times, July 15, 2010, http://rogerebert.sun times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19850920/REVIEWS/509200303/1023.

chapter 12

“A Tom Stoppard Film”: agency and adaptation in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead Elizabeth Rivlin

As the credits roll at the beginning of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), “A Tom Stoppard Film” appears on the screen in faux-antique calligraphy, advertising Stoppard’s ownership of the film and his status as auteur. In fact, the film is Stoppard’s in several senses: he was the dramatist whose play the film adapts, the writer who adapted the play to the screen, and the director who transformed the screenplay into a cinematic product. The film unusually allows Stoppard to occupy the position of both the adapting and adapter author / auteur; he had ample experience with the former role, including composing the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (1967) “in the margins of Hamlet.”1 He has also been keenly aware of the vulnerability of being a playwright whose works are by definition always open to performative adaptation. From the beginning of his career Stoppard was a self-confessed “very nosy author” with a reputation for rewriting his play texts during the rehearsal process and working closely with directors and actors to translate his authorial vision to the stage.2 Although he has acknowledged that theatre is an “event” rather than a text, and therefore that certain aspects escape the dramatic author’s control, he has also evinced a wishfulness that both the text’s authority and his own might be more expansive, more complete, and more capable of intervening to shape the exigencies of performance.3 The film of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern materializes Stoppard’s aspirations to manage the unstable negotiations between the authorial text and its performative incarnation; in this sense, the cinema allows him to seize control of the adaptive possibilities of his play and to insist, in this case at least, that the author / auteur is not completely dead. From its inception, the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern was about the power and constraints of dramatic authorship: the Player answers Guildenstern’s question: “Who decides?” with “Decides? It is written. We’re tragedians, you see. We follow directions – there is no choice involved.”4 Early on, 236

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12.1 Stoppard’s drama opens with his two characters framed in a blank wilderness, suggesting their existential dilemma.

however, Guildenstern complains: “We are entitled to some direction . . . I would have thought” (20) (Illustration 12.1).5 From the perspective of his characters, the author is both frustratingly omnipresent and absent; from the perspective of the author himself, he dictates every minute aspect of the material text but is unable to dictate what happens in performance. It is this anxiety-producing gap between authorial agency and performative choice that the film Rosencrantz & Guildenstern appears to massage and perhaps even eliminate entirely for Stoppard. As the creative force behind the “original” play text and the figure responsible for transforming the work; first, into a screenplay, and second, into cinematic enactment, Stoppard seems to have left nothing to chance. He has said that he undertook the project because “I’m the only director who would be willing to commit the necessary violence to this well-known stage play.”6 If the adapting author and text must wage “violence” against the original text, then only he, Stoppard, is up to the challenge, which, though he does not say it, is rendered considerably less audacious by the fact that it entails the author revising his own work rather than having it damaged by another. Thus, the author preserves himself precisely because he is willing to do injury to his work. There is, of course, another author, Shakespeare, at stake in both play and film, and Stoppard’s angle on adaptation might suggest that he sees himself as having committed an act of aggression against Shakespeare and his Hamlet. One of the fascinating things about Stoppard’s film is that it actually includes more of Hamlet than his play did.7 In an adaptation we might expect to lose something of the “original.” In an adaptation of an adaptation, then, we should lose even more, yet Stoppard infuses more of the “original” into the new adaptation, refuting the implication that

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adaptations disintegrate, or in Stoppard’s words, do “violence” to the works they adapt. If anything, the film reminds spectators of the iconic quality of Shakespeare’s authorship, even as it articulates an encompassing cinematic vision which might seem to eclipse all textual and authorial distinctions under the banner of the auteur. This chapter asserts, however, that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern defines the auteur not as a super-author who has overcome the limitations of writing for the theatre but as a sometimes insufficient sign of a collaborative agency that is spread not only among those involved in making the film but, even more importantly for my purposes, between adapted texts and authors whose traces and remains Stoppard makes evident throughout the film. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern does something very different from what Brian McFarlane suggests is the aim of film adaptations of novels; rather than seek “the effacement of the memory derived from reading the novel by another experience – an audiovisual-verbal one – which will seem, as little as possible, to jar with that collective memory,” the film cultivates audiences’ memories of multiple preceding texts.8 The film positions Stoppard’s play text as just one in a vast, ever enlarging network of adapted and adapting texts, giving it a similar status within the film to Shakespeare’s play. Even though in some senses Stoppard’s role as film auteur fulfills his dream as a playwright, in others it simply extends into a new arena his longstanding interest in the diffusion and partiality of authorial authority. To make clear the terms of my analysis, it is necessary to confront a methodological question that bears not only on my argument but on the subject matter of this volume: procedurally, how do we compare a film to a play? Despite its modern canonical status, theatrical productions of the play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are few and far between; most people today encounter it as literary text, most likely in the United States in the revised printed edition published by Grove Press in 1967.9 The film, on the other hand, is widely available; it can be purchased, rented, or streamed online.10 As a consequence of this discrepancy in access and reception, the play stands largely as a textual artifact. This fact gives priority to the authorial shaping which Stoppard performs extensively in the textual edition and makes us confront the literary dimensions of Stoppard’s authorship as well as the constructed relations between author and readers. There is a published edition of the screenplay, too, which deserves scrutiny as its own textual artifact, but it is highly unlikely that it would serve as someone’s primary or sole encounter with the film.11 The expectation is that critics encounter the film qua film. Certainly, opportunities exist to see the play live, but the understanding remains that there can be no “definitive” performance, since

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each theatrical iteration is singular; the film, on the other hand, remains fixed and inviolable, with the exception of new director’s cuts or other differentiated releases: the viewer’s understanding and interpretation may change during repeat viewings, but the components of the film are unchanging. Thus, the Grove edition of the play and the DVD can each be approached as a discrete text whose material features remain stable.12 I take W. B. Worthen’s important suggestion that we think of dramatic texts as individual performances analogous to staged performances, and yet we also do not want to lose the distinction between the closed circuits of textual performance at issue in this chapter and the open range of performances which occur in the live theatre.13 Stoppard’s abiding concern with what comes under the ambit of authorship might take on different colorations on stage, but for the purposes of this argument I am isolating several artifacts in which Stoppard enacts authority and control transparently. Perhaps not coincidentally, it is through these artifacts that most readers and audiences engage with a work by the name of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. While the film that takes on that label firmly registers Stoppard’s proprietorship, it also chips away at the divide between adapting and adapted works, so that it, like Stoppard’s play before it, becomes part of Hamlet as well as the other way around. As Margaret Jane Kidnie puts it, “the site of adaptation keeps getting entangled in the work’s ongoing development.”14 Critics have noted that scenes from Hamlet are represented seriously and non-parodically in the film, as if there are fragments of a Shakespeare film possessed by, or possessing, Stoppard’s.15 Stoppard achieves this effect largely by putting Ros and Guil in constant motion and propelling them in and out of contact with Hamlet. Though there are exterior shots of the Brežice Castle, in what is now Slovenia, which show Ros and Guil in a courtyard or walking through an outdoor cloister, the camera never grants aerial or other establishing shots that would give us a purchase on the Castle as a whole, nor does it provide insight into the connections between the various chambers, halls, galleries, passages, and staircases which Ros and Guil traverse (Illustration 12.2). As a result, we follow along with Ros and Guil as they struggle to catch up with the Player and the Tragedians in a wine cellar, or find themselves literally going in a circle, or eavesdrop from behind grates and doors on Polonius’s confidential conversation with Gertrude or Claudius, which is itself conducted on the move, or fall precipitously through a trapdoor and down a chute into a room where the Player is reciting Pyrrhus’s speech from 2.2 of Hamlet. Stoppard has said that while in the play Ros and Guil are “trapped” – they remain perpetually

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12.2 A costume drama of sorts, the film, with its rich interiors, stays true to some of the conventions of the genre.

on a single stage, at the mercy of whatever characters or action comes across them – in the film “they can do the rushing about.”16 Ros and Guil’s mobility contributes to the sense that Hamlet is interwoven with and inseparable from Stoppard’s film. The playful yet earnest combat that Stoppard’s play text generated between Shakespeare and himself, the arrogant young challenger, evaporates in the film, which was released twenty-four years after the play’s 1966 premiere at the Edinburgh Festival fringe. Authorial antagonism – Stoppard taking on Shakespeare – yields to an ease of accommodation, a “big tent” which makes room for both authors and their play texts to be represented. Somewhere on the long road to making this film, Stoppard seems to have decided to turn Shakespeare from a combatant to a collaborator.17 Stoppard’s failed screenplay from 1968 had elicited a recommendation from MGM that he “stick closer to the dramatic thread of Hamlet,” and although the film was eventually financed by the producers Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg, and distributed for theatrical release by Cinecom, Stoppard seems to have taken MGM’s advice to heart.18 Not only does the percentage of Shakespeare in the work increase from play to film, but the Hamlet material is distributed in smaller chunks throughout the film, with more alternations between Shakespeare’s dialogue and Stoppard’s. Still more Shakespearean dialogue is uttered in the film than is represented in the screenplay; contrary to the advice Hamlet gives the Players about the role of clowns, Stoppard gave his actors license to speak “more than is set down for them” (3.2.37).19 They are allowed to speak what Shakespeare, not Stoppard, set down for them. In writing the screenplay Stoppard was in the position of approaching not

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only Shakespeare’s play but his own as an adapter would, so that the liberties he takes with the play text of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern translate into a willingness to share the screen more amply with Shakespeare as well. Symptomatic of the film’s readiness to interrogate the authority of the play text of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is that it fills in gaps which the Stoppard of 1967 left deliberately unexplored. Again, Stoppard’s play emerges as subject to revision and instability to the same extent as Shakespeare’s was and is. In Stoppard’s play text, a much abbreviated version of Ros and Guil’s first and only sustained scene with Hamlet occurs at the end of Act One and picks up again at the beginning of Act Two. The very last lines in Act One are from the section of 2.2 in the second quarto (Q2) where Ros and Guil come onstage seeking Hamlet, who is pointed out to them by Polonius. The greetings between the old school friends – “Good lads how do you both?” (53) – are concluded by a blackout marking the end of Stoppard’s Act One; when Act Two begins, the stage directions indicate “HAMLET, ROS and GUIL talking, the continuation of the previous scene” (55). In the interstices of the two acts, Stoppard has skipped eighty lines from Q2. The film reinserts most of these lines, which establish Hamlet’s suspicions about the presence of Ros and Guil and launch him into the discourse which includes his famous question about the composition of humanity: “and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (31). Stoppard adds a passage found only in the Folio (F) text, in which Hamlet describes Denmark as a “prison,” and the world as “A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons” (30).20 The encounter plays in the film as two scenes set in the same dining chamber, separated only by musical tones and a dissolve after which the jumble of items on the table in the previous shot has been replaced by the remains of a meal. This may well be one of the episodes from Hamlet which Stoppard felt would provide more continuity to the film narrative. It certainly fleshes out the relationship between the three characters in a way that the play text refuses to do and motivates Ros’s despondency afterward about their reconnaissance effort: “I think we can say he made us look ridiculous” (33). Where the play text assumes a greater familiarity with the relevant scene of Hamlet on the part of readers and audience, thus obviating the necessity of representing it in full, the film makes no such assumptions, setting its sights on the demographically broader audience which both the “independent” cinema and the Shakespeare films that became so prominent in 1990s Hollywood sought to cultivate.21 It is as an adaptation of his own play and Shakespeare’s, though, that Stoppard’s choice here is most telling,

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for what the film does to the play text mimics what the play text had done to Hamlet. Stoppard turns to Shakespeare to adapt his own play to the screen. Notwithstanding its desire to appeal to a wider audience, the film invites spectators to watch a Shakespeare film as part of the experience of watching a Stoppard one. The lack of an original or definitive textual authority in Shakespeare’s Hamlet remains significant as well for Stoppard. Certain moments in the film gesture to the recognition that Shakespeare was an adapter, too, and that Stoppard’s own power extends to resurrecting Shakespeare’s lost or suppressed intertexts. Thus, the screenplay indicates that as Hamlet talks with Polonius, right before his dialogue with Ros and Guil, he is “crowing and clucking, squatting, waggling his elbows . . . Then – we see HAMLET is showing his book to a chicken” (28). It seems fairly obvious that these directions give Iain Glenn, who portrays Hamlet, a gimmick to render the character’s performative madness; less apparent is the fact that Stoppard is picking up a detail from Saxo Grammaticus’s Historiae Danicae. In that text, Amleth’s uncle, believing that Amleth will reveal his true plans to his mother in her bedchamber, tries to entrap him by planting a spy there. But Amleth, guessing that he might be overheard, “resorted to his usual imbecile ways, and crowed like a noisy cock, beating his arms together to mimic the flapping of wings.”22 Stoppard points to deferred textual origins by citing a characterization of Hamlet that precedes Shakespeare’s. When seen on film, the chicken business does a good deal to make Hamlet a robustly three-dimensional character – rather than a parody or cliché of popular imaginings of him – and therefore helps the film make a claim to engage earnestly and interpretively with Shakespeare’s material. In this example, a non-Shakespearean interpolation produces a Shakespearean effect, which may or may not be credited to the creative energy of Stoppard the auteur. In other words, the film makes it difficult to disentangle authorial inventions and innovations, even though most viewers are aware that Stoppard is responsible authorially for some parts of the film and Shakespeare for others. And paradoxically, the more educated a spectator is regarding Hamlet’s intertexts and adaptations, the harder it may be to identify who the true creative force is behind specific images, moments, or scenes. One of the most noticeable authorial marks on the play text is Stoppard’s stage directions. In contradistinction to Shakespeare (or at least what has survived textually of Shakespeare’s plays), but following in the footsteps of modern dramatists including Shaw and Beckett, Stoppard asserts his authorial presence liberally through stage directions. Talking in the early

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1970s about stage directions in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Stoppard struck a contentious tone: “I don’t really consider problems of directing when I’m writing a play. I write little stage directions which are like little time bombs that go off in the director’s hands when he picks them up.”23 There appears to be a subversive pleasure for Stoppard in the thought of his stage directions acting as destructive weapons and ambushing the director. Keeping in mind Worthen’s formulation that “Stage directions and speech prefixes are important because they are where the authorial meets the theatrical, where the writing meets the performer, where the poetics of the drama meet the conventions of the stage,” we might conclude that Stoppard viewed the meeting of page and stage as fundamentally combative and his stage directions as his proxy ammunition.24 A decade later, however, Stoppard sounded more conciliatory: “It all comes out the same because in rehearsal one becomes completely ruthless about changing it.”25 The pronoun “one” leaves it unclear whether it is Stoppard himself who is “ruthless” in modifying the directions for the stage or whether a director and/or actors make such decisions.26 Stoppard’s stage directions are at the core of his anxiety about dramatic authorial ambition and constraint; he has manifested both a deep investment in crafting such directions to influence theatrical representations of the text and a sort of writerly helplessness, a resignation to the fact that, in Worthen’s words, “the rhetoric of authority governing the relationship between writing and performance is always just that, rhetorical.”27 When considered as part of a reading text, however, stage directions shape the reader’s experience of the printed text and magnify Stoppard’s authority. Stoppard’s stage directions may have something in common with at least one early text of Hamlet. Lukas Erne theorizes that in editions such as the leisurely second quarto of Hamlet, stage directions are intended to help readers fill out their imaginations of the play, providing an aid which would be unnecessary for spectators in the theatre, as reflected for example in the much sparer text of the first quarto, which scholars including Erne believe is closer to Hamlet as it was initially performed.28 If he is correct, Hamlet’s second quarto anticipates a much more pronounced tendency in modern drama. Recent studies by Worthen and Martin Puchner have argued that the textual apparatus of twentieth-century plays acquired new significance in a literary culture that valued writing, print, and books over embodied theatrical representation. For Puchner, stage directions emerge as a foremost strategy in modernist drama’s insurgency against the theatre: their purpose is “not to replicate the stage, as if to preserve its particular theatrical and mimetic character, but to adapt, transform, and interrupt it”;

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when directed not at a stage director but at a reader, “their prescriptive force can range unchallenged.”29 In this way, Stoppard’s stage directions operate in the play text to buttress the very authority of the author that their “merely” rhetorical status in the theatre works to deny. Converting stage directions into film direction under the aegis of Stoppard the auteur relieves the insecurity of authorial impotence in the theatre but might also, on some accounts, push aside the literary authority to which stage directions contribute. This is much the claim that Tim Corrigan makes in broad strokes about the commercial success of film auteurism in the 1990s, which he accuses of dismantling textual authorship even as the auteur draws on the personal celebrity of the author and the desire of cinematic audiences to be associated with canonical literature.30 Yet in the case of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, Stoppard is both the vanishing author and the appropriating auteur, as well as playing a role Corrigan does not recognize: the appropriating author who has done to Shakespeare’s play what his film now does to his own play. Stoppard has frequently asserted that he participated in the writing of screenplays – including Brazil (1985), The Russia House (1990), Shakespeare in Love (1998), even Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (1989) – because they filled in financial and creative holes between plays and alleviated the constant pressure of coming up with a new story to tell, which he has said is the hardest part of writing for him.31 The distinction Corrigan draws between writing an original screenplay and adapting someone else’s narrative fails to account for the case of a writer adapting his own drama for the screen – and, furthermore, fails to account for Stoppard’s original play text, whose narrative impetus originally lies outside of itself.32 And Shakespeare’s text, adapted from Saxo Grammaticus’s eleventh-century Danish saga and Belleforest’s sixteenth-century French prose novella, possibly with the mediation of other drama, is denied the status of the original, too.33 In short, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern violates several times over any attempt to bifurcate between “classic” literature and vampiric, vacuous film adaptations.34 Tracing an example of a stage direction from the play text through to the film version reveals how Stoppard redistributes authorial agency in the cinema and constructs a new kind of conversation between himself and Shakespeare. The particular direction on which I focus coincides with the introduction of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the play text. As the Tragedians go off stage to prepare a play in their repertory, Rosencrantz discovers that the Player has been standing upon a coin which has come up tails. At this point Stoppard intervenes with a lengthy stage direction:

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He tosses the coin to GUIL who catches it. Simultaneously – a lighting change sufficient to alter the exterior mood into interior, but nothing violent. And OPHELIA runs on in some alarm, holding up her skirts – followed by HAMLET . OPHELIA has been sewing and she holds the garment. They are both mute. Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, no hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, ungartered and downgyved to his ankle, pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other . . . and with a look so piteous, he takes her by the wrist and holds her hard, then he goes to the length of his arm, and with his other hand over his brow, falls to such perusal of her face as he would draw it . . . At last, with a little shaking of his arm, and thrice his head waving up and down, he raises a sigh so piteous and profound that it does seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being. That done he lets her go, and with his head over his shoulder turned, he goes out backwards without taking his eyes off her . . . she runs off in the opposite direction. ROS and GUIL have frozen. GUIL unfreezes first. He jumps at ROS . GUIL : Come on! (34–35)

These stage directions repeat verbatim dialogue spoken by Ophelia in 2.1 of Hamlet, where she narrates an event that we do not get to see for ourselves.35 Shakespeare forces us to see the encounter through her eyes, and her perspective helps convince Polonius that Hamlet suffers “the very ecstasy of love” (2.1.99). In his play, Stoppard converts this verbal narration into a silent set of actions and gestures that the actors playing Hamlet and Ophelia are called upon to enact.36 Only a little while earlier, the Player has told Rosencrantz that “We do on stage the things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else” (28). These lines announce not only the Player’s attitude toward theatrical representation but Stoppard’s toward Shakespeare’s play. In accord with this principle, Ophelia and Hamlet’s melodramatic scene expresses for the audience that which was suppressed or excluded in Shakespeare. We see Hamlet acting in a distracted, mad manner rather than hearing about it from a biased participant. The matter gets more complicated when we focus on the printed word rather than the play in performance. On the page, we have only words – “Words, words. They’re all we have to go on,” says Guildenstern (41) – which both intensify and undermine Stoppard’s authorial control. Even audiences who know Hamlet well might not pick up on the congruence between Ophelia’s speech in Shakespeare and the action they see performed on stage in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern; it is also possible that the director and actors might not interpret these directions literally. For the reader, however, the specificity of the directions on the page is impossible to ignore. Stoppard seems intent on scripting the interlude down to the last detail,

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cueing readers as to exactly what we should imagine happening. In a sense, nothing is left to the imagination, putting readers in the same place as the characters. “We have no control,” says the Player (25). At the same time, however, Stoppard displays the consciousness that his words are not originally or solely his, that they have been borrowed from Shakespeare. He may be making a strategic move by making visible the invisible in Shakespeare, but the stage direction also creates the impression that Shakespeare is the author standing behind the author. Perhaps, then, it is actually Stoppard who is following Shakespeare’s directions. The film of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern reimagines the encounter between Ophelia and Hamlet and thereby reimagines the relationship between text and performance, as well as that of Shakespeare and Stoppard. As in the play, the moment serves as a transition from Ros and Guil’s conversation with the Player to their involvement in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but now it is made with a cut from the traveling stage in the woods, where Ros and Guil have suddenly been left alone to the interior of the Castle, the film’s “Elsinore,” where the camera confronts Ophelia running toward us, moaning and screaming, through a heavy floral curtain. A pantomime ensues with Hamlet in hot pursuit. The directions note that he “also bursts through the curtain, so wildly that he pulls the curtain down. It falls over the heads of ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN ” (13).37 While in the play they are “frozen” during the pantomime, in the film they do not see it at all, for they are struggling underneath the curtain, only emerging once Hamlet and Ophelia are gone (Illustration 12.3). Whereas the play promises visual access for Ros and Guil as well as for us, here the film delivers it only to us while keeping it from Ros and Guil. In addition to often showing them in motion, Stoppard’s film portrays

12.3 Guildenstern (Tim Roth) and Rosencrantz (Gary Oldman) are often bewildered by the strange and deadly world of Elsinore.

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Ros and Guil peering at Hamlet through doors, windows, trapdoors, and grates.38 Stoppard has stated that the most important variation for him between theatre and film is that “I could now change the frame . . . In the theatre you’ve got this medium shot, fairly wide angle, for two and a half hours. And that’s it folks. You can’t do jokes which depend on close-ups or different angles.”39 Indeed, Stoppard makes full use of the film’s ability to render perspectival changes by turning frames and framing, with an implied pun between them, into a major visual motif. The film continually frames the gazes of Ros and Guil, drawing attention to their enclosure and to our own spectatorship. Often, too, these frames interfere with their vision or are replaced by doors, walls, and other opaque impediments to sight. Here in their first collision with Hamlet, they are altogether blocked. Sometimes we share Ros and Guil’s limitations and have to confront our own lack of knowledge, but at moments such as this Ros and Guil are specially excluded from the seemingly universal, objective eye of the camera. The transformation of the theatre stage on which they stood in the previous scene into the film stage set is accomplished seemingly without Ros and Guil displaying any cognizance that they are now characters in a film. As spectators, however, we are immediately conscious that we have entered a Shakespeare film featuring acceptably high production values and a kind of quirky realism, both of which link Stoppard’s treatment of the Hamlet material to contemporaneous films such as Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V (1989) and Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (1990).40 It is interesting to observe that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is almost never considered in analyses of Shakespeare films, though it contains more direct representations of a Shakespeare text than do other films admitted into this canon, for example Shakespeare in Love or Tim Blake Nelson’s O (2001).41 This exclusion may be because of the perception that Stoppard’s film circumscribes or forecloses Shakespeare. But with this scene, Stoppard suggests exactly the opposite: he seems to want audiences to treat his film within a film with respect and to treat its characters as every bit as real – or perhaps as unreal – as Ros and Guil. By letting us begin to engage with Shakespeare before Ros and Guil do, he suggests that they are the last to know about the transformation in media. It is Stoppard’s play, rather than Shakespeare’s, that is struggling to catch up with the newly dominant mode of representation and spectatorship. If it is the case that Stoppard’s play text is subordinated within the film, the ruling authority is not Stoppard the screenwriter but Stoppard the auteur. For Stoppard’s stage directions in the screenplay have no more force over the scene as filmed than do his stage directions in the play text

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or than do Shakespeare’s. In the play text, Hamlet was called upon to wave his “head,” in keeping with the Q2 and F texts of Hamlet; in the screenplay, Hamlet waves his “hand” instead. However, what the screenplay dictates is not what occurs in the film, where there is no discernible hand (or head) waving, no “hand over his brow,” and no sighing. There is arguably a “little shaking of his arm” and a “perusal of her face,” but not for long enough to “draw it” (14). Hamlet grabs Ophelia (Joanna Roth) by the arm and the wrist before switching his grasp to the other hand. He proceeds to seize her around her waist and press her under him forcibly, before finally releasing her and staring at his upraised hands as if in surprise or horror. Throughout, Ophelia and Hamlet broadcast groans and grunts that sound erotically charged as well as distressed. The mood of the scene is frenetic, even manic, rather than melancholy and depressive as the directions adapted from Shakespeare might suggest. Finally, both characters run in parallel the length of the gallery as the camera cuts back to Ros and Guil still groping their way out from under the curtain. Just as stage directions in the play text remain by necessity “rhetorical” effects, so do the adapted stage directions in the screenplay. We don’t know who was responsible for introducing new blocking and gestural business into this scene, and this indeterminacy is itself significant. Even as Rosencrantz & Guildenstern highlights the category of auteur, it also suggests that the auteur cannot fully encompass the collective process of producing a film. At every stage of a performative adaptation, unpredictable transformations take place which disrupt the singularity, primacy, and omnipotence of the author and substitute a more partial, provisional, and often more collaborative vision of the creative process.42 If on the one hand, Stoppard sought to exercise a more complete authorial dispensation over the film, on the other he has freely acknowledged his lack of experience in directing and his heavy reliance on his cast and crew. He told one interviewer: “You don’t have to light a scene . . . There’s this guy who won an Oscar for doing that. You don’t pretend you know it all . . . I certainly wasn’t out to behave like somebody who – ‘My vision . . .’ – It is your vision. But you need these other collaborators – including the actors – to bring it about.”43 Competing definitions of the director’s role play out in Stoppard’s somewhat stumbling meditation. As the auteur, he possesses a “vision” of “how it [the film] was supposed to operate and how it would work and a sense that it wouldn’t work at all unless it was done this way and this is . . . what you have to do.”44 And yet Stoppard is also at pains to represent himself as a humble novice who copied Sergio Leone’s aesthetic, sought out the advice of experienced directors (he has mentioned visiting Mike Nichols on the set

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of Working Girl [1988]), and followed the lead of the professionals around him, including the stars Gary Oldman as Ros, Tim Roth as Guil, and Richard Dreyfuss as the Player.45 Although Stoppard has stated that “the event of theatrical production is lively” in the way that film is not, the discrepancies between screenplay and filmed scene suggest that films can be “eventful” productions in their own ways, ones which exist in excess of any singular author or director, even when that person is one and the same.46 Nowhere in Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is the simultaneous concentration and diffusion of authorial agency more self-conscious than in its extended sequence of inset plays. It begins with a dumbshow rehearsal of Hamlet by the Tragedians, starring the Player as Hamlet, for an audience of servants. The camera gives us frequent reaction shots of members of the audience, in turn providing contemporary cinematic audiences a sense of the broad-based, cross-class appeal of early modern theatre, the way in which a single play might work both for low-born servants and for their royal masters. The scene analogizes the accessibility and commercial success sought by early modern playing companies to similar aspirations on the part of late twentieth-century studios and filmmakers who attempted to bridge the divide between “mainstream” and “independent” films.47 The implied similarities between theatre and film anticipate Shakespeare in Love (1998), the screenplay for which Stoppard revised and which several critics have identified as Miramax’s ultimate marriage of independent branding and Hollywood ambition.48 Stoppard became involved with this project in 1991, just one year after the release of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and it seems probable that the connections he made in the earlier work between the media of theatre and film influenced his approach to the later screenplay, which is filled with jokes to the effect that Shakespeare and his contemporaries were hungry, underappreciated screenwriters before their time. The script calls for one character to ask about Will Shakespeare, “Who is that?,” and for another character to answer: “Nobody. The author.”49 This comment on the playwright’s absence of authority – and its parallels with modern screenwriting – resonates with the Tragedians’ rehearsal. There is not even a gesture toward a writer in this scene, whether Shakespeare or Stoppard; the emphasis is purely on the Tragedians’ visual, physicalized performance sans dialogue. It recalls Corrigan’s point that Shakespeare in Love and other films connected to classical authors invest more energy in their own representational acts than in the texts on which they are “based”: “Through auteurs . . . contemporary audiences begin to participate in a hermeneutics of image making balanced between interpretation and self-performance.”50 Here, the

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Player clearly operates as the auteur: he is both the creative force and the principal star of the Players’ production, taking over the authorial function in the media of drama and film alike. The sequence of inset plays continues with the Tragedians rehearsing the dumbshow from The Murder of Gonzago familiar to readers of Shakespeare’s play, now being played in the Castle’s Painted Hall in a stylized mode which draws a pointed contrast between its exaggerated theatricality and the transparent, naturalistic cinematic style which encloses it. This rehearsal is then superseded by the most artificial theatrical form of all: a miniature puppet show of The Murder of Gonzago watched by the Tragedians, still in character, as well as by Ros and Guil. The camera zooms in on a single real tear welling incongruously in the eye of the paper-mache Puppet “Poisoner” and then on the startled expression of the Player Claudius, until a jump cut substitutes a close-up of the equally aghast face of Claudius and we resurface on the main narrative level of the film. The sequence culminating in the puppet show displays what H. R. Coursen calls “the infinite regress of fictional formats,” a recursive trajectory which, I would add, counterpoises an increasingly artificial, unmimetic, even non-human theatre against a lucid hyper-realistic cinema.51 Embedded in this narrative retrogression is a critique of the cinema’s self-proclaimed superiority, for by portraying the myriad of media in which Hamlet can be created Stoppard suggests that film is just the latest in a long series of performative innovations. The auteur has no more claim to authenticity and priority of interpretation than do other figures, including Shakespeare and the Player, who stake their own claims to the material. As the sequence moves in the direction of artifice and stylization, the dramatic representations themselves take precedence, capped off by a seemingly agentless puppet show. We never see or know who is pulling the strings. At this extreme, Stoppard poses the question of whether the figure whom the film auteur most resembles is the puppet master, controlling the action behind the scenes but perhaps the least regarded of all possible author figures.52 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern underwent general release in 1991 to a lukewarm response from critics, balanced by the Golden Lion prize which it won at the Venice Film Festival the previous year, reportedly because Gore Vidal rammed it through over the objections of other jury members.53 One of the main criticisms leveled against the film was that it was too stagey and not cinematic enough. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby complained the film relied too much on verbiage and word play, and Roger Ebert opined that “this material was never meant to be a film, and can hardly work as a film” because its onstage / offstage conceit depends fundamentally on theatrical

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transmission.54 By these accounts, Stoppard’s film failed to adapt adequately from one medium to another, despite Stoppard’s sincere attempts to reinvent the material for the screen.55 The final scenes of the film, in particular, lay themselves open to the accusation that they are too theatrical. For this very reason, however, they also clarify Stoppard’s project as one that makes multiple authors and texts visible in the process of adaptation. While scenes earlier in the film were shot on location in what was then Yugoslavia, the scenes corresponding to the third act of Stoppard’s play were shot on what appears to be a soundstage representing a boat. During the film’s final minutes, obviously staged rain pours down on Ros and Guil, a phony-sounding battle is waged off screen between pirates and the Tragedians, and low-budget visual effects illustrate the action. When the Player rises, seemingly from the dead, after Guil thinks he has killed him, the score reprises the delicate, music-box melody that earlier accompanied the puppet show. In its closing moments, the film slides back toward the theatre and toward the play text against which Stoppard had vowed to commit violence. The most compelling cinematic images in these scenes are from the Shakespearean material: as the Player announces, “Deaths for all ages and occasions!,” we are treated to an “elsinore montage” of death scenes from Hamlet (63). And after Ros and Guil speak their final words, their necks within loose nooses, we are returned for the last time to Hamlet; in the Painted Hall, the Ambassador surveys with disbelief the living and dead and announces the deaths of Ros and Guil. The Hamlet montage and fragment of its closing scene offer relief and a release from the claustrophobic theatricality of the boat stage set; they provide a reminder of the visual sumptuousness and immersiveness of which film is capable, and they do so invertedly by calling upon the theatrical icon of Shakespeare. Characteristically, however, Stoppard does not leave it at that. Hamlet, too, is finally left behind, as “we see the two ropes straighten,” an action which bespeaks the possible hanging of Ros and Guil but which is also part of the “tragedians . . . folding up the side of the cart” and moving on to their next performance destination (64). At the end, Stoppard promotes a visual cinematic pun not anticipated by either Shakespeare’s play text or his own, and yet as he does so he highlights the mobility and permanence of the film’s theatrical intertexts.56 Guil and Ros may profess not to remember their pasts, but Stoppard’s film cannot afford to ignore its own, as it implicates itself in a web of adaptations and authorial interventions. Pace Barthes, the author/auteur has not died, exactly, but proliferates across Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, perhaps standing in for the

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Ghost of Hamlet Senior whom the film does not represent. One of these ghosts is surely Stoppard’s own. Notes 1. Alan Sinfield, “Making Space: Appropriation and Confrontation in Recent British Plays,” in The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness (New York: St. Martin’s Press / Manchester University Press, 1988): 130. Critics have debated over whether Rosencrantz & Guildenstern infiltrates Hamlet or the other way around; one of the striking features of Stoppard’s play is that it seems both to contain and be contained by Shakespeare’s. See Zoran Milutinović, “The Death of Representation and the Representation of Death: Ionesco, Beckett, and Stoppard,” Comparative Drama, 40 (2006): 353; and William F. Gruber, “‘Wheels within wheels, etcetera’: Artistic Design in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” Comparative Drama, 15 (1981–1982): 301. 2. Stoppard quoted in Mel Gussow, “April 1972,” Conversations with Stoppard (New York: Limelight Editions, 1995): 9. 3. Stoppard continues to repeat the line about theatre as an “event” in his most recent interviews. Henry Foy, “Tom Stoppard, beneficiary of the subconscious,” Reuters News Service, February 3, 2012. http://www.gmanetwork. com/news/story/246713/lifestyle/literature/tom-stoppard-beneficiary-of-thesubconscious. An early expression of the desire to direct his stage plays appears in an interview with Gussow, “April 1972”: 9. 4. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, consulting editor Henry Popkin (New York: Grove Press, 1967): 80. All references to the play text are hereafter cited parenthetically. 5. The question of whether Ros and Guil possess total freedom of agency, none at all, or most compellingly, whether these seemingly opposed options are in fact “two sides of the same coin” (Stoppard, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern: 23), has preoccupied critics since the play’s first production. See, for example, C. J. Gianakaris, “Absurdism Altered: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” Drama Survey, 7 (1968–1969): 52–58; and, much more recent, Neil Sammells, “The Early Stage Plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Katherine E. Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2001): 110. 6. Mervyn Rothstein, “A One-Act Dialogue Starring Tom Stoppard,” New York Times, November 26, 1989. 7. Ira Nadel, Stoppard’s biographer, notes that Stoppard “added more Shakespeare to provide greater continuity for the story (in the play, there were only approximately 250 lines from Hamlet) and eliminated about half the original play.” Therefore, the percentage of Shakespeare’s dialogue to Stoppard’s increases substantially in the film. Ira Nadel, Tom Stoppard: A Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002): 396. 8. Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 21. An unscientific sample of customer reviews on

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10. 11.

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amazon.com supports the perception that the majority of film viewers are familiar with, and often know well, Shakespeare’s and Stoppard’s plays. Nadel recounts that the first edition of the play, published in May 1967, included a version of the play’s ending that was rejected late in rehearsals and excised, along with a few other changes. Nadel, Tom Stoppard: 182, 188. There was also a UK edition published by Faber and Faber in 1967. On the complicated relationship between Stoppard’s theatrical scripts, modifications introduced during rehearsal and performance, and published editions of the plays, see Philip Gaskell, “Stoppard, Travesties, 1974,” in his From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978): 245–262. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, dir. Tom Stoppard, prod. Michael Brandman and Emanuel Azenberg, 2-DVD set, distributed on DVD by Image Entertainment. Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: The Film (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). References to dialogue spoken in the film, even when it is identical to that which appears in the play text, are to this edition and are cited parenthetically hereafter. Of course there are different textual editions of the play one could consider, as for example the first edition or the British edition published by Faber and Faber (see n. 9), the Samuel French acting edition, or the crude internet edition available at http://afronord.tripod.com/plays/R-G.html. In an “Author’s Note” that prefixes the Samuel French edition, Stoppard states: “There is no definitive text of ‘Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,’” Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (New York: Samuel French, 1967): 3. W. B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2005): 10. Margaret Jane Kidnie, Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation (London and New York: Routledge, 2009): 9. William Sheidley argues that “The realistic cinematic mode prevents Hamlet, Claudius, Ophelia, and the rest from seeming any less solid and three-dimensional than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even though they speak Elizabethan blank verse.” “The Play(s) within the Film: Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” in Screen Shakespeare, ed. Michael Skovmand (Aarhus University Press, 1994): 107. Stoppard quoted in Sid Smith, “Script Jockey: The Flickering Images of Theatre,” Theatre Magazine, 1 (1991), 16–19, rpt. in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Paul Delaney (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994): 235. On the characters’ mobility, see Elizabeth Wheeler, “Light It Up and Move It Around: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, 16 (1991): 5. Diana Henderson proposes collaboration as a guiding metaphor for the adaptation process, since the word “focuses attention on the connections among individuals, allowing artists credit and responsibility, but at the same time refusing to separate them from their social location and the work of others.” Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare Across Time and Media (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006): 8.

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18. MGM’s notes on Stoppard’s screenplay are quoted in Nadel, “Stoppard and Film,” in Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Kelly: 90. Cinecom, in business from 1982 to 1991, was one of the independent film distributors which changed the Hollywood landscape in the 1980s and 1990s. Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006): 209. 19. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, eds., Hamlet, Arden Series 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). This edition is based on the second quarto of Hamlet and is the text cited parenthetically in this chapter, except where otherwise noted. 20. Thompson and Taylor, eds., “Hamlet”: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, Arden Series 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). This edition contains the first quarto and Folio versions. 21. Although Rosencrantz & Guildenstern gets only passing, if any, mention in the many studies of independent cinema that have appeared in recent years, it is squarely situated within the late twentieth-century rise of independent films and within the story of their integration into and influence on mainstream Hollywood. See Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema; Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); and E. Deidre Pribram, Cinema & Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980–2001 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). Strangely, Stoppard’s film does not appear in Andrew Higson’s discussion of British heritage cinema, English Heritage, English Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2003). 22. Saxo Grammaticus, excerpt from Historiae Danicae, trans. Oliver Elton (1894), in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, vol. vii (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). The moment is preserved in François de Belleforest, Histoires tragiques (1570), translated in English as (anon.), The Hystorie of Hamblet (1608), in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, vol. vii. 23. Stoppard quoted in Gussow, “April 1974,” Conversations with Stoppard: 23. 24. Worthen, Print: 28. 25. Stoppard quoted in Gussow, “July–December 1983,” Conversations with Stoppard: 49. 26. In fact, Gaskell has shown that, in the case of Travesties (1984) at least, Stoppard worked collaboratively with the director and actors to modify text including stage directions. From Writer to Reader: 246. 27. Worthen, Print: 172. 28. On Shakespeare’s use of stage directions to differentiate “readerly” and “theatrical” versions of a play, see Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge University Press, 2003): 222–223. 29. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002): 27, 87.

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30. Timothy Corrigan, “Which Shakespeare to Love? Film, Fidelity, and the Performance of Literature,” in High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, ed. Jim Collins (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002): 155–181. 31. See, for example, Stoppard quoted in Smith, “Script Jockey”: 238. 32. Julie Sanders reminds us that adaptations “rework texts that often themselves reworked texts,” and thus complicate claims of authorial or textual originality. Adaptation and Appropriation (London and New York: Routledge, 2006): 24. 33. A brief summary of critical outlooks on a possible dramatic precursor commonly referred to as the Ur-Hamlet appears in Thompson and Taylor’s introduction to their edition of Hamlet: 44–47. 34. Corrigan’s unflattering definition of late twentieth-century film auteurism interestingly recalls early criticisms of Stoppard’s play: “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is a derivative play, correctly characterized by Robert Brustein as a ‘theatrical parasite,’” writes Normand Berlin in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: Theater of Criticism,” Modern Drama, 16 (1973): 269. 35. The Q2 and F editions render nearly identical versions of Ophelia’s speech. For Q2, see Thompson and Taylor, eds., Hamlet, 2.1.74–97; for F, see Thompson and Taylor, eds., “Hamlet”: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, 2.1.75–98. Characteristically, Q1 offers a briefer and markedly different version of the speech; Thompson and Taylor, eds., “Hamlet”: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, 6.38–55. 36. Stoppard has precedent in his method of adapting this episode. Thompson and Taylor note of Ophelia’s reportage that “some productions (and films) presented it in dumb-show, and it became a popular subject for illustration.” Hamlet: 233, n. to lines 74–97. 37. In the screenplay version of the stage direction, Ophelia’s lines from Hamlet are again repeated, but now they are abridged and clearly identified as Shakespeare’s with a parenthetical: “(to quote Shakespeare)” (14). The boundary is clear: Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and Stoppard is Stoppard. The filmed scene blurs these boundaries again, however. 38. See Sheidley, “The Play(s) Within the Film”: 108. 39. Stoppard quoted in Smith, “Script Jockey”: 236–237. 40. The fansite for the film, http://www.cwgsy.net/private/jason.monaghan/film. htm, contains information about the set used for “Elsinore.” It directs the reader to http://www.burger.si/Brezice/Seznam_GradBrezice.html, where photographs confirm that the castle used is the Brežice Castle in what was Yugoslavia at the time of filming and is now southwest Slovenia. According to information at http://www.slovenia.info/?grad=1202&lng=2, the Castle was built in the sixteenth century and the lavishly baroque interior design added in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 41. Several recent studies have identified shared elements, as well as the diversity, in films produced during the cinematic Shakespeare boom of the 1990s. See Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow, Herts.: Pearson / Longman, 2005); Samuel Crowl, Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide (New York:

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Norton, 2008); and Russell Jackson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 2007). 42. Comparing Shakespeare in Love to Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (2003–2004), King makes a complementary point: “The concept of the author/auteur remains important to the understanding and reception of such texts, from the work of Shakespeare to that of Tarantino, but it is not only in the latter case that the role of the author should be understood as a matter of the rearticulation of existing materials as well as of individual creativity.” Indiewood, USA: 135. 43. Quoted in Carla Hall, “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” Washington Post, March 27, 1991. 44. Stoppard quoted in Paul Allen, “Third Ear,” BBC Radio Three, April 16, 1991, rpt. in Tom Stoppard in Conversation, ed. Delaney: 244. 45. Paraphrased from Stoppard’s interview in the “Special Features” disc of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. Russell Jackson notes that Shakespeare films typically depend on “attractive or quirky casting – usually combining Hollywood stars with actors of recognised ‘classical’ theatre background.” Jackson, “Introduction: Shakespeare, Films and the Marketplace,” in Shakespeare On Film, ed. Jackson: 5. Stoppard follows precisely this formula. 46. Stoppard quoted from interview in the “Special Features” disc of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern. 47. Tracing the ways in which independent cinema became imbricated with the very mainstream cinema it was supposed to resist and oppose, Tzioumakis argues that it turned into an “industrial category” like many others in Hollywood. American Independent Cinema: 247. 48. On Miramax, see King, Indiewood, USA: 93, and Jim Collins, “High-Pop: An Introduction,” in High-Pop, ed. Collins: 23. 49. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard, Shakespeare in Love: A Screenplay (New York: Hyperion / Miramax, 1998): 49–50. Also quoted in Nadel, Tom Stoppard: 421. 50. Corrigan, “Which Shakespeare to Love?”: 167. 51. H. R. Coursen, “Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: The Film,” in Shakespeare: Text and Theater, Essays in Honor of Jay L. Halio, ed. Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1999): 185. 52. The image of the puppet master is used by one critic to compare Stoppard’s play unfavorably to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “Stoppard’s play is, I suspect, less durable because it has less real human content and because its puzzled heroes take on something of the alertness of their author who is pulling the alltoo-visible strings.” Here, Stoppard is condemned for an excess of authorial control. Michael Billington, Stoppard: The Playwright (London and New York: Methuen, 1987): 38. 53. Nadel, Tom Stoppard: 399. 54. Vincent Canby, “A Cockeyed Perspective On Elsinore,” New York Times, February 8, 1991. Roger Ebert, “Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 15, 1991.

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55. It is worth noting that Rosencrantz & Guildenstern has fared better with viewers on home video than it did with reviewers upon its theatrical release. Customer reviews on amazon.com are overwhelmingly positive, with 146 out of 189 reviewers giving it 5 stars out of 5. 56. Jill Levenson makes a similar point about Stoppard’s adaptation of Hamlet in the play of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern: “Stoppard has created a Shakespeare who is both transcendent and transient, a fixture and an appropriation.” “Stoppard’s Shakespeare: Textual Re-Visions,” in Cambridge Companion to Tom Stoppard, ed. Kelly: 156.

chapter 13

Rewriting history: Alan Bennett’s collaboration with Nicholas Hytner on the adaptations of The Madness of George III and The History Boys Joseph H. O’Mealy

As a writer and a public figure, Alan Bennett has been famous and much admired, even much loved, in England for half a century now. He began his career in the early 1960s as a member of the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe, made a small mark with the stage comedies Forty Years On (1968) and Habeas Corpus (1973), and then spent the better part of a decade writing closely observed character studies of the northern English middle classes for television. In 1982, he wrote his first monologue drama for television, A Woman of No Importance, which led, a few years later, to the work that altered the common perception of him as a comic observer of minor social embarrassment – a series of six dramatic monologues gathered under the title Talking Heads (1988). These ironic, mordant, sad, and funny solo turns, played by iconic English actors like Maggie Smith, Patricia Routledge, Julie Walters, and Thora Hird, led to a second, even darker, and more daring series of six television monologues, Talking Heads 2 (1998). Over the last twenty years, Bennett’s reputation as a serious writer, and not just an amusing entertainer, has grown even stronger with the publication of a volume of memoirs, Untold Stories (1999/2005); novellas like The Clothes They Stood Up In (1996), The Laying on of Hands (2001), The Uncommon Reader (2007), and Smut (2010); and a quartet of highly praised stage plays: The Lady in the Van (1999), The Madness of George III (2001), The History Boys (2004), and The Habit of Art (2009). From the beginning of his career as a playwright, Alan Bennett seems to have harbored an ambition to have a play produced at the National Theatre. In the late 1960s, when the National was an acting company under the direction of Laurence Olivier, Bennett submitted an early version of Forty Years On, entitled The Last of England. It was rejected.1 Twenty years later, Bennett’s ambition was realized when he received a commission to adapt his television play about Guy Burgess, An Englishman 258

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Abroad, into a two-act play for the National, by joining it to a new one-act, A Question of Attribution, about another of the Cambridge spies, Sir Anthony Blunt. Single Spies (1988), the witty double bill about the two traitors, was so successful that the National transferred it to a West End theatre for a longer run in 1989. The next year, the National mounted a production of Bennett’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, which not only “display[ed] to advantage the technical capabilities of the Olivier stage,”2 the largest of the National’s three spaces, but also, not so incidentally, signaled its confidence in Bennett’s ability to fill 1,200 seats. This production was supposed to be a children’s Christmas show, but it proved to be a huge success with adults and solidified Bennett’s reputation as a reliable National Theatre playwright. And perhaps just as importantly, it marked his first collaboration with Nicholas Hytner as his director. It is ironic that Bennett achieved his breakthrough at the National with adaptations, recasting not only his own work but also a familiar children’s classic – because up to this point the process of adaptation had only intensified Bennett’s considerable insecurities. Ten years before the National Theatre commissioned a play, his efforts to write a film version of Prick Up Your Ears (1987), John Lahr’s biography of the playwright Joe Orton, made him realize that the process of adaptation – selecting, editing, recasting – opened him up to a scrutiny he normally preferred to avoid.3 He admitted, for example, that in his stage version of The Wind in the Willows “my additions and alterations . . . are, I am sure, as revealing of me as the original text is of [Kenneth] Grahame.”4 Bennett even confessed to fretting over what it implied about him, as a person and an artist, whenever he unconsciously repeated himself in his work. Looking back at his television plays from the seventies and eighties, he reported, “I am disturbed . . . to note so many repetitions and recurrences. There are droves of voluntary workers, umpteen officials from the social services, and should there be a knock on the door it’s most likely to be a bearded vicar. Even Emily Bronte turns up twice.”5 Bennett’s partnership with Nicholas Hytner, since 2001 the artistic director of the grandly renamed Royal National Theatre, seems to have helped Bennett turn away from worrying about personal revelations and unconscious self-borrowings and begin enjoying the creative opportunities that adapting his own work might offer him. Bennett has acknowledged that “always beneath the play is the play you meant to write; changed but not abandoned and, with luck, not betrayed, but shadowing still the play that has come to be.”6 Adapting a play into a film would be one possible way

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to try again to express the ideal version of the play that he had “meant to write.” Hytner’s keenness, in his own words, to “demonstrate that I was a bona fide film director, my imagination no longer confined by the proscenium arch”7 was a galvanizing influence. He gave Bennett not just courage and technical assistance but a kind of permission to be more ambitious and daring. John Lahr has claimed that this partnership between writer and director has helped Bennett evolve “from a successful sketch writer and performer to one of the country’s most popular theatrical storytellers . . . [Hytner’s] nudging has pushed Bennett toward stronger story lines, greater depth, and more scenic surprise to shore up his wry, bitter-sweet voice.”8 From this collaboration have come, most notably, the stage play The Madness of George III (1991); its film adaptation, The Madness of King George (1994); and both the stage play (2004) and the film adaptation (2006) of The History Boys.9 Although both the plays and their subsequent films have received popular and critical approval, there are interesting differences in the nature of the success that the collaboration has achieved. These differences offer insight into some of the issues surrounding stage-toscreen adaptations. Adaptations from stage to screen that are controlled by the original playwright and the original stage director are not common. Nonetheless, there have been shining exceptions, such as Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan’s collaboration on A Streetcar Named Desire.10 Thanks to the prestige of Bennett’s name and the power of the state-subsidized Royal National Theatre, Bennett and Hytner have twice found themselves in this very select company. The continuity they have provided between stage and screen has made the topic that often dominates the discussion of a film adaptation – whether the adaptation is “faithful” to the original source – more or less irrelevant. It seems logical that if anyone should be given license to alter the material, it should be the original author and the original stager of the play; they cannot easily be accused of misunderstanding, misappropriating, or abusing the source material. Setting aside “fidelity” allows, then, a look at the reasons behind the revisions, omissions, and additions, and brings the discussion closer to an understanding of some of the fundamental social, cultural, and psychological factors that shape both media. James Naremore, building on Dudley Andrew’s seminal argument, has concluded that “it is time for adaptation studies to take a sociological turn,” because what we need is “a broader definition of adaptation and a sociology that takes into account the commercial apparatus, the audience, and the academic culture industry.”11 Both of the Bennett/Hytner collaborative adaptations fit well to such an analysis.

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The Madness of George III / The Madness of King George Even though The Madness of George III received some lukewarm reviews on its premiere in 1991, it was a huge success with its audience, thanks partly to the sly parallels Bennett suggested between the sorry state of the English monarchy at the end of the twentieth century and the crisis in the reign of King George III, some two hundred years before.12 It played for two years in repertory at the National, toured Britain, and even traveled to America, where it was staged in five different cities. The closest it got to Broadway, however, was a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in the fall of 1993.13 Nigel Hawthorne, who gave an extraordinary performance as the tormented George III, won nearly all the British acting awards that year, including the Olivier and the Evening Standard, for Best Performance by a Lead Actor. But Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches won the biggest prizes, the Olivier and Evening Standard awards for Best New Play.14 However, the success of The Madness of George III as a film, at least in terms of award nominations, was remarkable. Retitled The Madness of King George, in a purported attempt to assure the American audience that this was not a sequel to two earlier films about “mad” Georges,15 the play was given a lavish costume-drama treatment, with sweeping English landscapes and handsome visual settings: Eton College, the Bodleian Library, and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Recast with recognizable film stars, including Rupert Everett, Ian Holm, and Helen Mirren (Nigel Hawthorne was the major holdover from the original stage production), the film garnered four Oscar nominations. Hawthorne and Mirren were nominated for acting, Bennett for his screenplay, and Ken Adam for art direction; Adam was the only winner from the team. The film did not do blockbuster business at the box office, but it did reasonably well, especially in America, where the domestic gross was more than $15 million. The British box-office take was approximately half that taken in America.16 To a certain extent, the success of this royal biography probably paved the way for The Queen (2006) and The King’s Speech (2010), later Oscar-nominated biopics about the British monarchy. To many observers, such as David Chandler, The Madness of George III seemed a natural choice for a transfer to the screen: The play lent itself to the film medium in its natural expansiveness, doubtless inspired, to some extent, by Shakespeare’s plays about English kings. It had a lavish cast of twenty-five, and in his published script Bennett comments with

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dry humor on the difficulties even the generously subsidized National Theatre in London had staging the play in the sumptuous style its creator had imagined. Confined to the theater, the play was bursting at the seams.17

Nicholas Hytner, looking back from the perspective of his second collaborative adaptation with Bennett, relished the cinematic potential of this first project: There always seemed to be a film in The Madness of George III. It was shaped like a screenplay, and stage directions like “Outside St. Paul’s Cathedral” and “Inside the Royal Apartments, Windsor” required more than customary suspension of disbelief from the theatre audience . . . Watching Nigel Hawthorne gallop his horse towards the camera in Windsor Great Park, it was impossible not to believe that the story had found its intended medium.18

Nonetheless, Bennett and Hytner faced several challenges in crafting The Madness of George III to the screen. The first was to imagine how to reach a broad film audience for a subject presumably alien to the world beyond the upper-middle-class, well-educated English and Anglophile audience of the National Theatre. They had to discover a way to create interest in and sympathy for George III, though the vast majority of movie-going Americans would probably think of him as the arch tyrant and oppressor of human rights whom their ancestors had fought against in 1776. The second challenge was to create dramatic tension in the story of long-ago politicians and aristocrats jockeying for a prize that was unimportant to an international audience. What difference, after all, would it make to them if the Prince of Wales did or didn’t become regent? Bennett had trained as a historian at Oxford and relished the complex politics of the late Georgian era and the turmoil caused by the king’s recurring illnesses, which appeared to show clear symptoms of mental instability. Whether the king should step aside in favor of his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, until he recovered (supposing that he would indeed recover), had galvanized parliamentary debate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That the Prince of Wales was allied with the opposition Whigs, led by James Fox, against his father’s champions, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger and the Tory Party, only added to the intensity of the turmoil. But the intensity was more intellectual than dramatic. Even in the development of the script for the play, Bennett discovered that time and again he had to sacrifice his interest in historical detail to the dramatic necessities of the stage.19 The crafting of the screenplay required even more sacrifice of historical accuracy in favor of dramatic

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and visual intensity. And ultimately, in the screenplay, Bennett had to give up the struggle to present the political intricacies of the period in their full complexity, a challenge he hadn’t completely abandoned in the stage play. He confessed that he had been “forced into departures from history by the exigencies of the drama, the insistence of the director and sheer desperation.”20 In addition to “opening up” the story to authentic settings (sometimes more apparent than actual: Eton College is used as a stand-in for Westminster) and hiring more box-office-friendly actors, Bennett and Hytner made some very canny concessions to familiar movie genres, such as the western and film noir. For example, Lady Pembroke, who in the play is a mature woman of about fifty (when the king takes a fancy to her in one of his fits of lunacy), becomes a much younger and more conventionally beautiful femme fatale, who seduces the king’s naïve equerry to give the queen access to the incommunicado king. When the equerry presumes to continue their liaison past the single seduction, he is quickly disabused of his mistake: “It was what was required, Mr. Greville, that was all.”21 And the climactic scene in the film resembles the classic cavalry rescue, where the king has seemingly only minutes to make an appearance before Parliament in order to squelch the impending vote to create a regency headed by his son. George sets out in his carriage, and the camera cuts back and forth between his forward progress (delayed for precious minutes, of course, by a herd of sheep blocking the road) and the preparations for the vote at Westminster. The king, needless to say, arrives with only seconds to spare. This sequence was Nicholas Hytner’s idea. Bennett has recorded how his own resistance to the ahistorical nature of the king’s journey was eventually worn down by his director’s insistence: “Had Nicholas Hytner at the outset suggested bringing the King from Kew to Westminster to confront the MPs, I would have been outraged at this adjustment to what had actually happened. By the time I was plodding through the third draft I would have taken the King to Blackpool if I thought it would have helped.”22 The problem of creating sympathy for an unsympathetic main character (at least, unsympathetic to Americans) was largely handled by shifting the focus of the film from the realm of political arcana to the more familiar ground of family and domestic relations between George and his wife and children. George, as a faithful husband to his wife, whom he cozily refers to as Mrs. King, and the two of them as the parents of fifteen children, present a picture, if not of domestic bliss, then of domestic fullness. Even the Prince of Wales, who seems more befuddled than scheming in the film, now has a

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family with the addition of a new character, Maria Fitzherbert, the woman whom the prince did actually marry, only to be forced to discard her because she was a Catholic. The final scene of the film gives perhaps the best evidence of the greater foregrounding of the family. In front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, at the thanksgiving ceremony for the king’s recovery, Bennett transposes earlier stage dialogue to this climactic celebration of the family united in gratitude for the monarch’s restoration to health. George admonishes both his sullen heir and his second son, the duke of York, to make an effort to look more like part of a happy unit: “We must try to be more a family. There are model farms now, model villages, even model factories. Well, we must be a model family for the nation to look to.” Bennett’s script adds a comment: “At the top of the steps the royal family smile and wave. Who could think they are not happy?”23 The version of the play performed at the National Theatre in 1991 and 1992 included a scene that featured a twentieth-century doctor, Ida MacAlpine, who delivered her diagnosis of the king’s apparent madness – porphyria, “a metabolic disorder that produced chemical changes in the nervous system and symptoms similar to dementia and dermatitis.”24 This scene was cut in the 1993 mounting of the stage play because it seemed to be a clumsy intrusion of the contemporary into the historical past. But it made clear what would later be soft-pedaled – that George’s “madness” would recur, in 1802 and 1810, that his apparent cure at the end of the play was at most temporary, and that his suffering was sure to return. In the film, the presentation of this theory, which has had its adherents and detractors, was handled with a simple printed title after the action had ended and before the credits began to roll. It read, “The colour of the King’s urine suggests he was suffering from porphyria, a physical illness that affects the nervous system. The disease is periodic, unpredictable – and hereditary.”25 Even though the film goes further than the revised stage version to signal the doom George would face, this “sentimentality,” in the words of one critic, which offers “a kind of alternative history in which goodness triumphs and there is a certain providential fairness in the world . . . prevents The Madness of King George from ranking with Shakespeare’s plays on the English kings.”26 So, spectacle, pomp, and a very canny shift of attention onto the domestic travails of a father besieged by his usurping son, and away from the historical record of Whig vs. Tory, made the unlikely figure of King George a man one might not exactly identify with, but a man for whom one could certainly feel pity.27 This strategy had its success at the box office and with those who oversee the Academy Award nominations.

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The History Boys If biography is unmistakably the basis for The Madness of George III, even though all the historical details may not be beyond question, then The History Boys can be seen as Bennett’s foray into autobiography, even though factual equivalences may not always be precise. That the eight young men are called “history boys” means they are planning to study history (or, as Americans would say, to major in history) at a university. Their academic interest echoes Bennett’s personal history, which the eight fictional characters reenact. They attend a good, middle-class, provincial school in northern England (Bennett attended Leeds Modern School); however, while their school lacks the academic prestige of an English “public” school like Eton or Harrow, it has an ambitious headmaster, who is determined to improve the school’s academic standing by getting some of his students admitted to Oxford and Cambridge, rather than to a provincial university like Leeds, Durham, or Bristol. Through hard study and the application of a method whereby they distinguish themselves from the hundreds of better-prepared applicants by crafting examination essays that “argued in brisk generalities flavoured with sufficient facts and quotations to engage the examiner’s interest and disguise . . . basic ignorance,”28 all eight students gain places at these prestigious universities. (Using the same approach to writing about history – more journalistic than scholarly – Bennett received a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford.) Bennett remembers his success with his usual modesty and regret, which tends to underplay his intelligence and overdo his guilt to such an extent that he calls the play “both a confession and an expiation.”29 But the conflict that Bennett invents for this play – between an older, charismatic, but flawed teacher who believes that education is a preparation for life and a young substitute teacher who introduces these students to the notion that education is an instrument for career advancement – provides a political context that is only marginally autobiographical and hardly nostalgic. It reminded English audiences of the education wars of a generation before, when Margaret Thatcher’s proposals to make education more relevant, accountable, and assessable first came into play. Veteran favorites Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour play the older teachers, and Samuel Barnett, Dominic Cooper, and James Corden are among the history boys. With all of them getting to speak some of Bennett’s wittiest lines, the themes of “confession and expiation” seemed rather remote from what the play’s first audiences experienced. The public reception of The History Boys was, in fact, a mirror image of the success of George III/King George, with the former receiving greater

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acclaim as a play and the latter as a film. The History Boys opened in London, in May 2004, to a chorus of critical approval. Michael Billington of the Guardian called it “subtle, deep-wrought and immensely funny . . . in short, a superb, life-enhancing play.”30 Paul Taylor of the Independent saw the mixed nature of the play, its “hilarity, its acute wisdom and its unforced intimations of pain, emotional isolation and understated tragedy,” and concluded that, “full of lightly worn profundity,” the play “is a delight – and an education.”31 The History Boys swept the awards for 2004, winning the Olivier, the Evening Standard, and the London Critics’ Circle awards for Best New Play. Buoyed by this kind of near unanimity among the British critics and the public, the National Theatre decided to give The History Boys the Broadway production that The Madness of George III never had. It would be, in fact, the first Broadway production of any Alan Bennett play since 1975, when Habeas Corpus was presented and quickly folded. There were, nonetheless, some quiet doubts about the transferability of the subject matter. Ben Brantley’s review in the New York Times stated that concern quite plainly: “The themes and situations of this comic drama . . . about a battle for the hearts and minds of schoolboys preparing for their university entrance exams are not of a kind to put American theatergoers at instant ease.” But, he was happy to report, “This production moves with a breezy narrative swagger that transcends cultural barriers.”32 The New York newspaper reviewers were almost without exception full of praise for the ensemble of actors, for the director, and most of all for the playwright. The sole exception was Clive Barnes in the New York Post, himself an Englishman, who found the play “hopelessly overblown, overhyped and overrated,” and professed that he couldn’t accept the premise that these students were Oxbridge material: “One young man doesn’t even know the meaning of the word ‘meretricious.’ The playwright certainly does.”33 Perhaps the most sympathetic review came from Variety, that showbiz bible, whose critic David Rooney began by placing Bennett in the context of his English contemporaries: Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Caryl Churchill are brilliant intellectual playwrights, but Bennett is as much a humanist as an intellectual. His plays are the work of a restless, questioning mind but also of a gentle soul and an immovable outsider whose writing has remained impervious to the effects of success and privilege. It’s the sparkling balance of the literate with the poignant that makes “The History Boys” so enjoyable.34

The History Boys won nearly all the New York theatre prizes for Best Play that season, as well as Best Lead Actor for Richard Griffiths, with its

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crowning glory the near sweep of the Tony Awards, winning a record-tying six: for Best Play (Bennett), Best Director (Hytner), Best Actor (Griffiths), Best Actress in a Featured Role (Frances de la Tour), Scene Design (Bob Crowley), and Lighting Design (Mark Henderson).35 News that the movie version of The History Boys had been filmed with the same cast, director, and, of course, writer, in six weeks during the summer of 2005, with a modest budge of $3.4 million, which was raised “in a partnership of Byzantine complexity between the BBC, DNA Films and Fox Searchlight,”36 led some other journalists to wonder about the audience for the adaptation. Sylviane Gold in the New York Times, a few weeks before the film’s release and while the stage version was still running on Broadway, asked the question directly: “With its rambunctious comedy, serious themes and peerless ensemble acting, ‘The History Boys’ has been a magnet for theater prizes . . . But can its stage success be repeated at the movies?”37 The reviews of the film were equivocal. Time called it “watchable, mildly witty, not particularly gripping,”38 and the New York Times decided, “For all its delights ‘The History Boys’ is not a world-changing work of art . . . Below the surface lies a gooey custard filling.”39 Even more skeptical was Variety, whose idiosyncratic language gave its verdict a kind of insider authority that proved largely prophetic: The History Boys may please fans of the original legit production and the stragglers who didn’t catch it in Gotham or London’s West End. However, auds coming cold to this largely faithful adaptation of Alan Bennett’s clever but contrived classroom comedy won’t be so wowed, given pic’s irrevocably stagy feel . . . Hard-marketing push and Bennett’s name should reap interest from Blighty’s chattering classes when it opens in the U.K. on Oct. 13, but History may struggle to push beyond sophisticated urban centers upon Stateside release Nov. 22.40

Even though Sylviane Gold suspected that the late-November release date meant “the film [was] clearly being positioned for the end-of-the-year awards derby,”41 weak box-office results proved that hope a false one, if anyone had really harbored it. Compared to the $15+ million American box office for The Madness of King George a dozen years earlier, The History Boys grossed less than $3 million in the United States. It did much better internationally, but the domestic American market more often than not determines whether a film is a success, and thus Oscar material.42 Oscar’s benediction did not fall a second time on the Bennett/Hytner team. Twenty years earlier, Bennett had devised a rule when he wrote his first screenplay, A Private Function: “There is no such thing as a good script, only

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a good film.”43 The question of whether the film adaptation of The History Boys is a “good film” is one that Nicholas Hytner asked himself after its release.44 If it was clear to him that The Madness of George III had the dramatic scope and historical sweep to be a popular movie, “it took us longer to believe that The History Boys belonged on the screen . . . I think I worried that it might turn out to be too esoteric for a larger public.”45 The audiences at the National, however, had responded strongly and positively to Bennett’s witty presentation of opposing views on the purpose of education. They seemed to recognize, and perhaps identify with, the eight young men from a northern state school who had set themselves the challenge of gaining admission to Oxford and Cambridge. And they relished the conflict between Hector and Irwin, with their paradoxical mixtures of assurance and vulnerability. Sensing that the theatre audience took pleasure in the characters as much as it responded to the debate about education, Hytner decided that a film was possible, but it would not be at all like their previous collaboration. This film would rely on the strengths of the stage version – its aphoristic wit and repartee, its tight ensemble of actors, none of them bankable stars, and its paradoxical smallness: This time I started out by offering Alan very little beyond a conviction that we shouldn’t try to open out something that worked precisely because it was enclosed. Closed worlds can be as eloquent on film as they are on stage. Schools, prisons, hospitals, courtrooms: they all operate according to easily graspable rules and stand as microcosms of the wider world. Alan worried that he didn’t have anything much to add to the play; I was glad that he didn’t. My models were the great Hollywood play adaptations of the midtwentieth century. The Front Page, The Philadelphia Story and A Streetcar Named Desire waste no effort on straying from the centre. Their energy springs from the dynamic exploration of small worlds that are fully inhabited by large spirits.46

Without the obvious commercial concessions to the film audiences’ expectations and needs that marked the adaptation of The Madness of George III, The History Boys did, nonetheless, undergo some interesting changes in its own transition to film. Some of these were minor, mostly because of judgments about what worked more effectively in the new medium, and some suggest a serious rethinking of the emotional impact and meaning of the more sensitive and even controversial aspects of the play. Among the minor changes was the decision to eliminate all the direct addresses to the camera, with the exception of the final scene when Mrs. Lintott summarizes the future lives of the eight boys. This decision required some sacrifice, nevertheless. For example, one of the biggest laughs in the stage version had

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come when, after silently observing the male characters address the audience for the entire first Act, Mrs. Lintott (played with deadpan dryness by Frances de la Tour) finally gets her chance to speak to the audience directly: “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice, my role a patient and not unamused suffrance of the predilections and preoccupations of men.”47 But tempting as it might have been to rely on what had worked so well before, both Bennett and Hytner knew that what brought a surefire laugh on stage would surely seem odd on the screen. As Bennett says, talking to the audience “is easily done on the stage but much harder to bring off on film.”48 And although the addresses to the camera survive in the published screenplay, and were filmed, they wound up on the cutting-room floor, Hytner deciding to choose the alternative of incorporating this information in dialogue or as a brief voice-over. Even after Bennett had finished the screenplay, he had to agree to revise one of his few attempts to “open up” the play. Bennett had hoped that the film would allow more space for a glimpse at the boys’ families, and there survives most notably a quick montage of those families awaiting the arrival of the admissions letters that will offer the boys a place at Oxford and Cambridge. But beyond some mild fun with the number of Akhbar’s siblings, the age of Posner’s parents, and the corpulent Timms family waiting to open the letter until after they have finished their substantial breakfasts, Bennett realized that his plans for expanding the world of the students just would not work: “The film like the play is about the school and the outside world scarcely figures.”49 In the transition from stage to film, the most significant changes involve two of the main characters: Posner, the youngest of the students, who does not hide his infatuation with his classmate Dakin, and Irwin, the substitute (“supply”) teacher who is brought in by the headmaster to give the students the polish he thinks will get them into an Oxbridge college. Along with Hector, they continue to be the main characters of the story, but, unlike Hector, their treatment differs decisively from the play to the film. One can only speculate on the reasons for the changes, but perhaps these are motivated, at least in part, by the author’s and the director’s growing affection for the characters (and the actors who portray them) over the course of a long collaboration, as well as their deepened insight into these characters, which long acquaintance can often bring. The alterations in Posner’s and Irwin’s fates are among the rare occasions in popular literature, perhaps last, and best, exemplified in Victorian serial novels, where, after the characters have already been introduced to the public, the author reconsiders his original assessment of them and alters their fates accordingly.

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Act One of the play opens with Irwin in a motorized wheelchair giving advice to a handful of MPs on how to sell to the public a bill on abolishing trial by jury by turning its obvious deficit (the loss of a cherished right) into a positive virtue (the amplifying of public safety). This evocation of Orwell’s dissection of totalitarian rhetoric in 1984 (“War Is Peace”) establishes Irwin, now in his forties, as a cynical and glib collaborator with the fascistic elements in British government. The first scene of Act Two shows Irwin five years later enjoying the benefits of his siding with government power. Still in the wheelchair, he is now a celebrity historian, filming on location at Rievaulx Abbey, lecturing for BBC2 about the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII. Whether one considers these two scenes as flashforwards to the present day, or the rest of the play as a flashback to the 1980s, Irwin’s presentation to the audience is strongly negative. How he ended up unable to walk is not yet clear, but the wheelchair signifies his damaged nature as clearly as do his ideas. Neither scene appears in the film; Bennett and Hytner have transformed their assessment of Irwin. He is no longer simply the inauthentic straw man representing the Thatcherite philosophy of education, which, in Bennett’s view, masks a crass disregard for truth and learning in favor of flashy and shallow careerism. As a result, he has become a much more sympathetic character and thus a much more credible foil for Hector. As Hytner explains it, the balance between Hector’s view of learning for its own sake and Irwin’s more practical, results-oriented approach has been recalculated: “I hope the result is a film that, even when it follows the same script as the play, often seems to be saying something more . . . In the film, Stephen Campbell Moore’s Irwin provides Hector with truly formidable opposition, seductive enough to allay the suspicion that there’s a thin line between a sparkling intellect and a flashy one.”50 Moreover, the use of the close-up in the film, which gets “behind the eyes”51 of the characters and provides an intimate view that the stage does not, offers the actor playing Irwin an opportunity to display “an unexpected vulnerability that belies his intellectual arrogance.”52 We see this new vulnerability most dramatically in the scenes between Dakin and Irwin as Irwin struggles to resist Dakin’s determined efforts at seduction, which range from clumsy flattery to a graphic proposition. Perhaps the remark of Dakin’s that causes Irwin the most discomfort, because it hits closest to the truth, is the question “How come there’s such a difference between the way you teach and the way you live? Why are you so bold in argument and talking, but when it comes to something that’s actually happening, I mean now, you’re so fucking careful?”53 In the play, Irwin’s reluctance to

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13.1 French instruction at this Sheffield grammar school includes a good deal of inventive and witty playacting.

take Dakin up on his sexual offer seems like a cagey avoidance of a dangerous situation. But in the film, what seemed to be calculation now seems an inability to grab at life, and it comes as something of a surprise that Irwin shares this weakness with Hector. One of the comic highlights of both play and film is Hector’s lesson in the use of the French subjunctive and conditional, in a scene set in a French brothel and conducted entirely in high-school French, but whose import is unmistakable to everyone except the confused and suspicious headmaster (Illustration 13.1). Speaking and acting in the subjunctive mood is made sexy and comic in this piece of playacting, but living in the subjunctive is less funny. The film makes it clear that Irwin, like Hector, also lives in the subjunctive and the conditional moods, those forms of language that mark what might be, what could or should be, but what rarely is (Illustration 13.2). It’s not accidental that when the students choose a scene from a classic movie to perform as a quiz for Irwin, as Hector has taught them to do, it’s the final scene in Brief Encounter, the quintessential example of middle-class English repression and noble suffering. Needless to say, Irwin guesses it right away. At the end of the film, Irwin walks into Hector’s memorial service on crutches – with only a broken leg, thus spared the play’s permanent relegation to a wheelchair. There is a passing reference to his future career as a television historian/journalist, but he seems not at all the glib charlatan of the play. Posner’s original fate is sadder and harsher than Irwin’s. He is not even granted the consolation of a hollow celebrity. At the end of the play, he is described by Mrs. Lintott as a recluse unable to cope with his life: “He lives alone in a cottage he has renovated himself, has an allotment and periodic

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13.2 The educational regime changes when a new history teacher, Mr. Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), challenges his “A” level charges to reject conventional approaches to the subject.

breakdowns . . . He has long since stopped asking himself where it went wrong.”54 Earlier, in the first scene of Act Two, when the wheelchair-bound Irwin is pontificating for the BBC about monasteries, the adult Posner appears, unidentified until the end of the scene, and tries to extort information from Irwin about Hector so that he can sell it to a newspaper. Irwin accuses him of concealing a recording device and dismisses him with contempt. This seems a pitiful and curious fate for such an appealing character, one gifted by Bennett with a theatrical flair for achingly sung Rodgers and Hart torch songs that directly address the object of his unrequited longing with naïve honesty. He seems as much impatient about when he’ll get the chance to act on his homosexuality as he is confused by it. We might expect more resilience in a character who can verbalize his situation in such an endearingly clear-eyed but comical syllogism: “I’m a Jew. I’m small. I’m homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I’m fucked.”55 Bennett, however, obviously saw Posner’s difference as the element that defined and destined him for an unhappy life. The final scene at the end of the first Act of the play, which brings Posner into a tutorial with Hector on Thomas Hardy’s poem “Drummer Hodge,” crystallizes the connections between these two outsiders. As they jointly explicate the story of the young drummer boy killed in the South African wars, thousands of miles from his northern English home, Hector’s analysis of Hardy’s characteristic use of compound adjectives reveals as much about him and Posner as about poets and their language: “Uncoffined is a typical Hardy usage . . . Un-kissed. Un-rejoicing. Un-embraced. It’s a turn of phrase he has bequeathed to Larkin, who liked Hardy, apparently. He

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does the same. Un-spent. Un-fingermarked. And with both of them it brings a sense of not sharing, of being out of it. Whether because of diffidence or shyness, but a holding back. Not being in the swim.” The scene ends with Hector placing his hand on the desk, almost inviting Posner to break their shared isolation, but Posner hesitates, and, according to Bennett’s stage directions, “The moment passes.”56 The dismal ends that Bennett has conjured for Posner and Irwin in the play (and for Hector too, who dies in a motorcycle crash) led one critic for a gay newspaper to complain, “The queer soap opera elements play out quite movingly and compellingly until the last 20 minutes, when any and all of the gay characters end up dead, maimed or otherwise pathetic. Why the hell do so many gay playwrights continue to think it somehow brave to physically or emotionally mutilate the characters who most resemble them?”57 It’s a fair question when one considers that Bennett has admitted, “I wince[d] to hear my own voice at sixteen”58 when he watched Samuel Barnett play Posner. It is unlikely that Bennett read that particular review, and to hazard other guesses as to why he softened Posner’s and Irwin’s fates, specifically as gay men, might “lead only to speculations of dubious value,”59 but the Posner we see in the film is not the neurasthenic victim we see in the play. He has found a role and place in the world that takes the edge off his otherness, one that in fact makes use of his otherness. As he says in answer to Mrs. Lintott’s query about his life after the history boys: “Slightly to my surprise I’ve ended up, like you, a teacher. I’m a bit of a stock figure . . . I do a wonderful school play, for instance . . . and though I never touch the boys, it’s always a struggle, but maybe that’s why I’m a good teacher. I’m not happy, but I’m not unhappy about it.”60 In his muted, if compromised, contentment he is actually not much different from most of the seven other history boys. Scripps becomes a journalist instead of a “real” writer; Dakin becomes a tax lawyer – “the money’s incredible”; Rudge develops real estate of a somewhat dubious quality; Timms runs a chain of dry cleaners – “And I take drugs on the weekend”; the two minority students, Akhtar and Crowther, take a more respectable path, becoming a headmaster and a magistrate; and Lockwood dies at twenty-eight, shot by “friendly fire” while serving in the military.61 The death of Lockwood is new to the film; in the play he becomes a magistrate like Crowther. When Hytner and Bennett did the voice-over commentary for the DVD of The History Boys, they offered only one explanation for Posner’s more affirmative ending: to inflict a third tragedy on the audience, after the deaths of Lockwood and Hector, “would skew the film.”62 But that seems a bit

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disingenuous, since Lockwood, one of the least prominent of the eight students, was killed as an afterthought, and his death, while pathetic, does not impact the audience much at all. Nonetheless, their reasoning makes sense if one considers that the film is, in an important sense, another draft of the play that Bennett “meant to write.” While it is undeniably true that the play has a “deep ironic structure,”63 the film sheds some of that distancing to diminish the villainy (Irwin) and victimhood (Posner) of two of its main characters. The language may remain theatrical in its aphorism and wit – no sixth-form students in the 1980s, however brilliant, ever spoke in such perfectly formed sentences – but the camera’s capacity to allow us to see right into a character’s eyes has led to this kinder and gentler treatment of the characters. The amount of time Bennett and Hytner spent with the characters and the actors who became them undoubtedly has played its role as well. Even Hector, who seems larger than life (and as played by Richard Griffiths is almost literally so), has become more human and vulnerable in the film. A troubling aspect of his character has always been his surreptitious groping of the boys when they ride behind him on his motorcycle.64 Even Griffiths himself confessed to not understanding it. “I’ve asked Alan Bennett about it, to tell you the truth. What could you possibly get out of it? There’s no sense of gratification.”65 Bennett apparently never gave Griffiths a satisfactory explanation, and the one Griffiths has contrived for himself makes as much sense as any: Hector acts out of compulsion and guilt. Since he cannot imagine acting on his desires openly, he has learned to limit the expression of his sexual attraction to the occasional, ineffectual grope. Neither Bennett nor Hytner defends Hector’s behavior,66 though they both must have thought it worth preserving in the film, if only to remind the audience of the complexity and persistence of sexual desire, even in the least likely of us. To balance this equivocal behavior, to make it clear that Hector is not, as Dakin says, “a joke,”67 the film tries to give more space to Hector’s private sorrow, which even the students have no real understanding of, though they think that by patiently enduring his fumblings they have taken the measure of the man (Illustration 13.3). A clear example comes in the different handling of the scene where Hector breaks down in front of the students and weeps. “What made me piss away my life in this god-forsaken place? There’s nothing of me left.”68 In the play, after a few awkward and embarrassing moments for the students, Hector raises his head, blows his nose, and announces to the class, “I don’t know what all that was about, I’m sure. Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail. I am an old man in a dry season. Enough.”69 The

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13.3 The general-studies teacher known as “Hector” (Richard Griffiths), charismatic but flawed, encourages the boys’ creativity.

boys then cheer him up by performing a particularly campy scene from The Painted Veil (1945), which he identifies after some coy hesitation, and everyone is smiling and laughing again. The film, by contrast, cuts both Hector’s attempt to make light of his breakdown (“Nothing is here for tears”) and the boys’ attempt to restore a lighthearted tone. Instead, the camera lingers on Hector’s bowed head as he weeps lavishly, and Posner attempts to comfort him with very tentative and awkward pats on the back. In his next scene, Hector is leading a classroom discussion with Irwin where the topic is the ethics of teaching the Holocaust. In opposition to the more pragmatic Irwin’s stand that the Holocaust, like any other historical event, is open to revisionist examination, Hector’s deep moral sensitivity to the mystery of real human horror shines through. To answer Hytner’s question about whether The History Boys is a “good film” – even as good a film as The Madness of King George – may be impossible. The success Bennett and Hytner achieved with King George was partly because of their conscious accommodation to the generic expectations of the classic Hollywood costume drama. The History Boys is certainly a different kind of film, more intimate, more English, and perhaps more uncompromising. Instead of opening up vistas and settings to embrace the larger world beyond the stage, it looks deeper into the small world its characters inhabit and makes them more recognizable. Notes 1. Ronald Bergan, Beyond the Fringe . . . And Beyond: A Critical Biography of Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore (London: Virgin, 1989): 152–153.

276

JOSEPH H. O’MEALY

2. Alan Bennett, The Wind in the Willows (London: Faber and Faber, 1991): xii. 3. Joseph H. O’Mealy, Alan Bennett: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2001): 132–134. 4. Bennett, The Wind in the Willows: xxiii. 5. Bennett, Talking Heads (London: BBC Books, 1988): 8. 6. Bennett, The History Boys (London: Faber and Faber, 2004): xx. 7. Nicholas Hytner, “Introduction,” in The History Boys: The Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006): x. 8. John Lahr, “Curtain Raiser,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012: 36. 9. After The History Boys, Bennett and Hytner went on to collaborate on The Habit of Art (2009) and People (2012) at the National Theatre. 10. More common is the playwright who adapts his own stage play, as exemplified by David Mamet’s work on the film of Glengarry Glen Ross. Rarest of all is the playwright who adapts his own stage play and then directs the film version of it, as Tom Stoppard did with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead. 11. James Naremore, “Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation,” Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000): 10. 12. O’Mealy, Alan Bennett: 141. 13. Benedict Nightingale, “Theater; Ill or Mad, George is a Royal Role,” New York Times, Sept. 26, 1993. www.nytimes.com/1993/09/26/theater/theater-ill-ormad-george-is-a royal-role.html. 14. At both www.olivierawards.com and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening_Standard_ Award you can find lists of past winners in several categories. 15. Alan Bennett, The Madness of King George (London: Faber and Faber, 1995): xv. 16. Source: boxofficemojo.com/movies. 17. David Chandler, “Representing the Mad King: George III in the Cinema,” Journal of Popular Film & Television, 36 (Summer 2008): 78. 18. Hytner, “Introduction”: vii. 19. O’Mealy, Alan Bennett: 141–142. 20. Bennett, The Madness of King George: xxi. 21. Ibid., 71. 22. Ibid., xxi. 23. Ibid., 74. 24. Alan Bennett, The Madness of George III (London: Faber and Faber, 1992): 92. 25. Bennett, King George: 74. 26. Chandler, “Representing the Mad King”: 80. 27. See O’Mealy, “Royal Family Values: The Americanization of Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 27.2 (1999): 90–96 for a more detailed analysis of the transfer from stage to screen of George III’s “mad business.” 28. Bennett, The History Boys: xv. 29. Ibid., xvii. 30. Michael Billington, Review of The History Boys, Guardian (London), May 19, 2004. www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2004/may/19/theatre1.

The Madness of George III and The History Boys

277

31. Paul Taylor, Review of The History Boys, Independent (London), May 19, 2004. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/the-historyboys-national-theatre-6169537.html. 32. Ben Brantley, “Rivals for Young Hearts and Minds,” New York Times, April 24, 2006. theater.nytimes.com/2006/04/24/theater/reviews/24boys.html. 33. Clive Barnes, “Pompous Circumstances,” Rev. of The History Boys, New York Post, April 24, 2006. www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/item_GbrOVZAP1 XM8DRkJv3WO8M. 34. David Rooney, Review of The History Boys, Variety, April 23, 2006. 35. Campbell Robertson, “It’s ‘Jersey Boys’ and ‘History Boys’ at the Tony Awards,” New York Times, June 12, 2006. theater.nytimes.com/2006/06/12/ theater/theaterspecial/12tony.html. 36. Hytner, The History Boys: The Film: xii. 37. Sylviane Gold, “Six Tonys but No Stars: Can This Play Be a Film?”, New York Times, September 10, 2006. www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/movies/movie sspecial/10gold.html. 38. Richard Schickel, “The History Boys Makes the Grade,” Review Time, November 22, 2006. www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1562682,00.html. 39. Stephen Holden, “From the Stage to the Screen: History Worth Repeating,” Review, New York Times, November 21, 2006. movies.nytimes.com/2006/11/ 21/movies/21hist.html. 40. Leslie Felperin, Review of The History Boys, Variety, October 10, 2006. 41. Gold, “Six Tonys.” 42. The American box-office take for History Boys was $2,706,659, while the international take was $10,695,293, for a combined gross of $13,401,952, which is less than the American gross alone for Madness of King George. Source: www. imbd.com. 43. Alan Bennett, A Private Function (London: Faber and Faber, 1984): 9. 44. Hytner, The History Boys: The Film: xiii. When I inquired of Hytner his view of the comparative box-office records of these two films, he replied: “A much more interesting question is whether The History Boys is as good a film as The Madness of King George” (personal correspondence: February 28, 2012). 45. Hytner, The History Boys: The Film: vii. 46. Ibid., xi. 47. Bennett, The History Boys: 68. 48. Alan Bennett, “Film Diary,” The History Boys: The Film (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006): xxiii. 49. Ibid., xviii. Two new characters do appear in the film: the art teacher, played by Penelope Wilton, and the physical education instructor, played by Adrian Scarborough. Both function more like extras to fill out the faculty common room than like characters who will enrich or alter the story. 50. Hytner, The History Boys: The Film: xiii. 51. The History Boys, dir. Nicholas Hytner, perf. Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Stephen Campbell Moore (2006), DVD: Commentary (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment).

278 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

JOSEPH H. O’MEALY

Hytner, The History Boys: The Film: xiii. Bennett, The History Boys: The Film: 97. Bennett, The History Boys: 108. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 55–56. Jonathan Warman, “Brit ‘History Boys’ Repeat Hit in U.S.,” Review, New York Blade, May 15, 2006. 58. Bennett, The History Boys: xxvii. 59. John J. Stinson, “Bennett’s The History Boys: Unnoticed Ironies Lead to Critical Neglect,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate, 16.1–2 (2006/ 2007): 233. 60. Bennett, The History Boys: The Film: 107. 61. Ibid., 105–106. 62. The History Boys, DVD: Commentary. 63. Stinson, “Bennett’s The History Boys”: 220. 64. See readers’ comments about Stephen Holden’s New York Times review of The History Boys to gauge the considerable hostility in some quarters against Bennett and Hytner’s treatment of Hector’s gropings of the students. 65. Joyce Wadler, “Richard Griffiths, Raised in Silence, Exults in Applause,” New York Times, June 11, 2006. http://theater.nytimes.com/2006/06/11/theater/ 11wadl.html. 66. In the DVD Commentary, Bennett and Hytner refer to Hector’s behavior as “desperately sad and ineffectual” and judge as “real weasel words” Hector’s offering the defense of the “erotic nature of the transmittal of knowledge.” 67. Bennett, The History Boys: The Film: 97. 68. Bennett, The History Boys: 65; The History Boys: The Film: 65. 69. Bennett, The History Boys: 66.

Filmography

A TASTE OF HONEY (1961)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Tony Richardson Tony Richardson for Woodfall Films Shelagh Delaney from her play Walter Lassally Dora Bryan (Helen), Robert Stephens (Peter Smith), Rita Tushingham (Jo), Murray Melvin (Geoffrey), Paul Danquah (Jimmy), and Michael Bilton (the Landlord) THE BROWNING VERSION (1951)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Anthony Asquith Teddy Baird and Earl St. John Terence Rattigan from his play Desmond Dickinson for General Film Distributors and Universal Pictures Michael Redgrave (Andrew Crocker-Harris), Jean Kent (Millie Crocker-Harris), Nigel Patrick (Frank Hunter), Ronald Howard (Mr. Gilbert), Wilfrid Hyde-White (the Headmaster), Brian Smith (Taplow), and Bill Travers (Fletcher)

THE BROWNING VERSION (1994)

Director Producer Script Cinematography

Mike Figgis Ridley Scott for Paramount Pictures Ronald Harwood from the play by Terence Rattigan Jean-François Robin 279

280

Filmography

Principal actors

Albert Finney (Andrew Crocker-Harris), Greta Scacchi (Laura Crocker-Harris), Matthew Modine (Frank Hunter), Julian Sands (Tom Gilbert), Michael Gambon (Dr. Frobisher), and Ben Silverstone (Taplow) EDUCATING RITA (1983)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Lewis Gilbert Lewis Gilbert for Columbia Pictures Willy Russell from his play Frank Watts Michael Caine (Dr. Frank Bryant), Julie Walters (Susan “Rita” White), Michael Williams (Brian), Maureen Lipman (Trish), and Malcolm Douglas (Denny)

ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE (1970)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Douglas Hickox Douglas Kentish for Canterbury Film Productions Clive Exton from the play by Joe Orton Wolfgang Suchitzsky Beryl Reid (Kath), Harry Andrews (Ed), Peter McEnery (Mr. Sloane), and Alan Webb (Kemp) THE HISTORY BOYS (2006)

Director Producer

Nicholas Hytner Damian Jones, Kevin Loader, and Nicholas Hytner for BBC Two Films Script Alan Bennett Cinematography Andrew Dunn Principal actors Richard Griffiths (Hector), Clive Merrison (Felix, the Headmaster), Frances de la Tour (Mrs. Lintott), Stephen Campbell Moore (Irwin), Samuel Anderson (Chris Crowther), Samuel Barnett (David Posner), Dominic Cooper (Stuart Dakin), James Corden (Richard Timms), Sascha Dhawan (Adi Akthar), Andrew Knott (James Lockwood), Russell Tovey (Peter Rudge), Jamie Parker (Donald Scripps), and Georgia Taylor (Fiona)

Filmography

281

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1952)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Anthony Asquith Teddy Baird and Earl St. John for British Filmmakers Anthony Asquith from the play by Oscar Wilde Desmond Dickinson Michael Redgrave (John Worthing), Michael Denison (Algernon Moncrieff), Edith Evans (Lady Bracknell), Joan Greenwood (Gwendolen Fairfax), Margaret Rutherford (Miss Prism), Miles Malleson (Canon Chasuble), and Aubrey Mather (Merriman) JOURNEY’S END (1930)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

James Whale George Pearson for Tiffany Pictures Joseph Moncure March from the play by R. C. Sherrif Benjamin H. Kline Colin Clive (Capt. Denis Stanhope), Ian Maclaren (Lt. Osborne), David Manners (2nd Lt. Raleigh), Billy Bevan (2nd Lt. Trotter), Anthony Bushnell (2nd Lt. Hibbert), Robert Adair (Capt. Hardy), and Werner Klingler (German prisoner)

THE KNACK . . . AND HOW TO GET IT (1965)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Richard Lester Oscar Lewenstein for Woodfall Films Charles Wood David Watkin Rita Tushingham (Nancy Jones), Ray Brooks (Tolen), Michael Crawford (Colin), Donal Donnelly (Tom), William Dexter (Dress Shop Owner), Charles Dyer (Man in Photo Booth), Margot Thomas (Female Teacher), John Bluthal (Angry Father), and Helen Lennox (Girl in Photo Booth) LOOK BACK IN ANGER (1959)

Director Producer

Tony Richardson Harry Saltzman and Gordon Scott for Warner Brothers

282

Filmography

Script Nigel Kneale from the play by John Osborne Cinematography Oswald Morris Principal Actors Richard Burton (Jimmy Porter), Claire Bloom (Helena Charles), Mary Ure (Alison Porter), Edith Evans (Ma Tanner), Gary Raymond (Cliff Lewis), and Donald Pleasence (Hurst, the market inspector) THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE (1994)

Director Producer Script Cinematography Principal actors

Nicholas Hytner Stephen Evans and David Parfitt for Samuel Goldwyn Alan Bennett from his play Andrew Dunn Nigel Hawthorne (King George III), Helen Mirren (Queen Charlotte), Ian Holm (Dr. Willis), Anthony Calf (Fitzroy), Amanda Donohoe (Lady Pembroke), Rupert Graves (Greville), Geoffrey Palmer (Warren), and Rupert Everett (The Prince of Wales) PLENTY (1985)

Director Producer

Fred Schepisi Joseph Papp and Edward R. Pressman for RKO and 20th Century Fox Script David Hare from his play Cinematography Ian Baker Principal actors Meryl Streep (Susan Traherne), Charles Dance (Raymond Brock), Tracey Ullman (Alice Park), John Gielgud (Sir Leonard Darwin), Sting (Mick), Ian McKellen (Sir Andrew Charleson), and Sam Neill (Lazar) PYGMALION (1938)

Director Producer

Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard Gabriel Pascal for General Film Distributors and MGM Script W. P. Lipscomb and Cecil Lewis from the play by George Bernard Shaw Cinematography Harry Stradling

Filmography Principal actors

283

Leslie Howard (Henry Higgins), Wendy Hiller (Eliza Doolittle), Wilfrid Lawson (Alfred Doolittle), Marie Lohr (Mrs. Higgins), Scott Sunderland (Colonel Pickering), and Jean Cadell (Mrs. Pearce)

ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD (1990)

Director Producer

Tom Stoppard Emanuel Azenberg and Michael Brandman for WNET-13 New York Script Tom Stoppard Cinematography Peter Biziou Principal actors Gary Oldman (Rosencrantz), Tim Roth (Guildenstern), Richard Dreyfuss (The Lead Player), Iain Glen (Prince Hamlet), Ian Richardson (Polonius), Joanna Miles (Gertrude), Donald Sumpter (King Claudius), and Sven Medvesck (Laertes) SLEUTH (1972)

Director Producer

Joseph L. Mankiewicz Morton Gottlieb for Palomar Pictures and 20th Century Fox Script Anthony Shaffer from his play Cinematography Oswald Morris Principal actors Michael Caine (Milo) and Laurence Olivier (Andrew) SLEUTH (2007)

Director Producer

Kenneth Branagh Kenneth Branagh and others for Castle Rock and Sony Pictures Script Harold Pinter Cinematography Haris Zambarloukos Principal actors Jude Law (Milo) and Michael Caine (Andrew) THIS HAPPY BREED (1944)

Director Producer Script

David Lean Noël Coward David Lean, Ronald Neame, and Anthony HavelockAllan from the play by Noël Coward

284

Filmography

Cinematography Ronald Neame Principal actors Robert Newton (Frank Gibbons), Celia Johnson (Ethel Gibbons), Alison Leggatt (Aunt Sylvia), Stanley Holloway (Bob Mitchell), John Mills (Billy Mitchell), Kay Walsh (Queenie Gibbons), and Amy Veness (Mrs. Flint)

Index

1914 (book), 14 1984 (novel, 1949), 270 49th Parallel, The (Michael Powell, 1925), 46 Absurd Person Singular (play, 1972), 4 Acapulco, 114 Aeschylus, 66 Agamemnon (play), 66 Agate, James, 18 Aldgate, Anthony, 10 Alexandroff, Grigori, 18 Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966), 178 All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), 12, 28 Allsop, Kenneth, 103 Anderson, Lindsay, 71, 87 Andrew, Dudley, 141, 194 Angel of the North (sculpture, 1998), 178 Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches (book, 1993), 261 Angels One Five (George More O’Ferrall, 1952), 87, 99 Angry Young Men Dramas, 63 “Annus Mirabilis,” 161 anti-Aristotelianism, 3 Apartment, The (Billy Wilder, 1960), 55 Apollo Theatre, The, 15 Arad, Ron, 176 Armistice Day, 23 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 80 Artaudian Theatre of Cruelty, 3 Arts Theatre (Cambridge), 122 Ashcroft, Peggy, 77 Asquith, Anthony, 57, 62 Asquith, Herbert, 86 Asquith, Margot, 86 Associated British Picture Corporation, 85 Associated Talking Pictures, 22 Atkinson, Brooks, 10 Austen, Jane, 125

Ayckbourn, Alan, 4 Azenberg, Emanuel, 86 Baird, Teddy, 240 Balcon, Michael, 12, 89 Bardolatry, 6 Barker, Harvey Granville, 7 Barnes, Clive, 266 Barnett, Samuel, 265 Barrie, J. M., 3 Barry, Gerald, 230 Barthes, Roland, 251 Battersea, 54 Battersea Park, 56 Bazin, André, 9, 96, 130 BBC, the, 18 Beaverbrook, Max, 45 Beckett, Samuel, 63 Bennett, Alan, 9, 258 Bennett, Susan, 123 Berger, John, 182 Berlin, 16 Beyond the Fringe (play, 1960), 258 BFI, the, 23 Big Ben, 57 Billington, Michael, 266 Billy Liar (John Schlesinger, 1963), 127 Biograph, 6 Black, Edward, 69 Blackfriars Bridge, 57 Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock, 1929), 18 Blackpool, 48 Blair, Tony, 175 Blithe Spirit (play, 1941), 45, 48 Bloom, Claire, 113 Blunt, Sir Anthony, 259 Bodleian Library, the, 261 Bogarde, Dirk, 114 Bonham Carter, Helena, 77 Boon, Richard, 217

285

286 Boys from Brazil, The (Franklin J. Schaffner, 1978), 8 Bracco, Rosa Maria, 15 Branagh, Sir Kenneth, 8, 170 Brandman, Michael, 240 Brantley, Ben, 266 Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985), 244 Brecht, Bertolt, 3 Brideshead Revisited (TV, 1981), 77 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (David Lean, 1957), 48 Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), 45 British Board of Film Censors, the, 5 British Film Makers, 86 British International Pictures, 22 British Theatre Yearbook of 1946, The, 56 Brittain, Vera, 14 Brixton, 21 Broadway Melody, The (Harry Beaumont, 1929), 52 Bronze Lion of San Marco, the, 99 Brook, Peter, 3, 130 Brooke, Rupert, 14 Brooklyn Academy of Music, the, 261 Brown, Curtis, 15 Brown, Geoff, 94 Brown, John Russell, 217 Browne, Maurice, 15 Browning Version, The (film, Anthony Asquith, 1951), 88 Browning Version, The (play, 1948), 62 Browning Version, The (radio play, 1957), 62 Browning Version, The (TV, 1955), 62 Browning Version, The (TV, 1985), 62 Bruckner, Anton, 54 Brunel, Adrian, 22 Burgess, Anthony, 149 Burgess, Guy, 258 Burton, Richard, 113 Caine, Michael, 170 Calvert, Phyllis, 68 Campbell, Dorothy and Christie, 89 Campbell, Judy, 48 Canby, Vincent, 226, 250 Cannes Film Festival, the, 114 Cardullo, Bert, 131 Carey, Joyce, 48 Carrington VC (Anthony Asquith, 1955), 89 Carrington (Christopher Hampton, 1995), 77 Carry on Sergeant (Gerald Thomas, 1958), 88 Carson, Bruce, 137 Castle, Brežice, 239 Cavalcade (play, 1931), 44 CBS, 59

Index Chamberlain, Neville, 52 Chandler, David, 261 Chaplin, Charlie, 113 Chapman, Edward, 22 Charleston, the, 52 Charley’s Aunt (play, 1892), 89 Church Gibson, Pamela, 137 Churchill, Caryl, 266 Cinecom, 240 Cineguild, 46 Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 46 Clancy, Tom, 8 Clapham Common, 56 Clive, Colin, 16 Clockwork Orange, A (novel, 1962), 149 Close Up, 18 Closer (Mike Nichols, 2004), 178 Clothes They Stood Up In, The (novella, 1996), 258 Connell, R. W., 171 Conolly, L. W., 203 Cooper, Dominic, 265 Corden, James, 265 Coronation of Elizabeth II, the (1953), 85 Corrigan, Tim, 244 Costello, Donald, 35 Cottage on Dartmoor, A (Anthony Asquith, 1929), 68, 100 Coursen, H. R., 250 Covent Garden, 35 Coward, Nöel, 22, 48 Cowie, Peter, 121 Criminal Law Amendment Act, the (1885), 98 Crowley, Bob, 267 Crowley, Jeananne, 210 Crying Men (photo series, 2004), 178 Cukor, George, 206 Culture and Anarchy, 80 Cunningham, Michael, 216 Curse of Frankenstein, The (Terence Fisher, 1957), 88 Cushing, Peter, 62 Dali, Salvador, 4 Dam Busters, The (Michael Anderson, 1955), 87 Damage (novel, 1991), 216 Dance Hall (Charles Crichton, 1950), 88 Dance, Charles, 229 Darlow, Michael, 63 Davis, Judy, 77 de la Tour, Frances, 265 Dead End (William Wyler, 1937), 51 Dead of Night (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1945), 69 Dean, Basil, 22 Death and the Maiden (play, 1990), 261 Delaney, Shelagh, 122

Index

287

Demi-Paradise, The (Anthony Asquith, 1943), 57 Dench, Judi, 62, 77 Denison, Michael, 87 Dent, Alan, 116 Dillon, Carmen, 99 Dixon, Simon, 185 Doctor’s Dilemma, The (Anthony Asqith, 1955), 89 Dollimore, Jonathan, 148 Donald, James, 48 Donat, Robert, 49 Dorfman, Ariel, 261 Dresser, The (Peter Yates, 1983), 81 Dr. Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), 51 Dreyfuss, Richard, 249 Durgnat, Raymond, 128

Forster, E. M., 64 Forty Years On (play, 1968), 258 Foucault, Michel, 185 Four Sons (John Ford, 1928), 28 Frayn, Michael, 266 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (film, Karel Reisz, 1981), 226 French New Wave, the, 129 French Without Tears (film, Anthony Asquith, 1940), 68 French Without Tears (play, 1938), 63 Friedan, Betty, 208 Frohman Brothers, the, 6 Front Page, The (film, Lewis Milestone, 1931), 268 Fussell, Paul, 13

Easy Virtue (Alfred Hitchcock, 1928), 22 Ebert, Roger, 226 Edison, Thomas, 6 Educating Rita (play, 1980), 192 Educating Rita (film, Lewis Gilbert, 1983), 194 Edward VIII, 47 Edwards, Henry, 13 Eisenstein, Sergei, 18 Eliot, T. S., 3 Elizabethan Theatre, 1 Elliott, Kamilla, 217 Enchanted Cottage, The (play, 1923), 4 English Stage Company, 122 English Touring Theatre, 5 Englishman Abroad, An (TV, 1983), 259 Entertaining Mr. Sloane (play, 1964), 145 Erne, Lukas, 243 Erskine, Eileen, 52 Eton College, 261 Evans, Edith, 87 Everett, Rupert, 261 Express, The, 45 expressionism, 3 Exton, Clive, 162 Eyre, Richard 6, 123

Gainsborough Studio, 68 Genevieve (Henry Cornelius, 1953), 87 Ghosts (play, 1891), 1 Gibbs, A. M., 203 Gibson, Church, 138 Gielgud Theatre, 94 Gielgud, John, 62, 77, 94, 229 Gilbert, Lewis, 194 Girl of London, A (Henry Edwards, 1925), 13 Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944), 55 Gold, Sylviane, 267 Goodbye, Mr. Chips (book, 1934), 64 Goodman, Lizbeth, 124 Gormley, Antony, 176, 177 Gorton, Assheton, 133 Grahame, Kenneth, 259 Grammaticus, Saxo, 242 Granger, Stewart, 68 Great Exhibition of 1851, the, 230 Great War and Modern Memory, The (novel, 1975), 13 Greatest Show on Earth, The (Cecil B. DeMille, 1952), 99 Greene, Graham, 45 Greenwood, Joan, 87 Griffith, D. W., 44 Griffiths, Richard, 265 Grindstaff, Laura, 193 Guare, John, 229

“Famous Players in Famous Plays,” 229 Fanny By Gaslight (Anthony Asquith, 1944), 68 Feminine Mystique, The (book, 1963), 208 Festival of Britain (1951), 85 Film Mercury, 17 Film Quarterly, 117 Final Test, The (play, 1951), 89 Findlater, Richard, 94 Finney, Albert, 77 First Episode (play, 1933), 63 Follett, Ken, 176 Fontanne, Lynne, 49 For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood, 1943), 55

Habeas Corpus (play, 1973), 258 Habit of Art, The (play, 2009), 258 Hall, Lesley A., 179 Halliwell, Kenneth, 145 Hamlet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1990), 247 Hampstead Public Library, 145 Hannah, Daryl, 229 Hard Day’s Night, A (Richard Lester, 1964), 127 Hare, David, 216

288

Index

Harman, Jympson, 90 Harrison, Rex, 206 Harrow University, 63 Hart, Josephine, 216 Havelock-Allan, Anthony, 46, 51 Hawthorne, Nigel, 261 Hay Fever (play, 1924), 44 Hearst, William Randolph, 46 Hearts of the World (D. W. Griffith, 1917), 44 Hecht, Ben, 44 Hemingway, Ernest, 55 Henderson, Mark, 267 Henry V (Kenneth Branagh, 1989), 8 Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944), 57 Hepburn, Audrey, 206 Hepburn, Katharine, 49, 228 Hickox, Douglas, 147 Hill, John, 126 Hiller, Wendy, 36 Hilton, James, 64 Hird, Thora, 258 Historiae Danicae, 242 History Boys, The (play, 2004), 258 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18, 68 Hobson’s Choice (David Lean, 1954), 51 Hodson, Gillian, 63 Hoffman, Dustin, 8 Holiday, The (Nancy Meyers, 2006), 178 Holloway, Stanley, 53 Hollywood, 26 Holm, Ian, 62, 261 Hopkins, Anthony, 77 Hours, The (novel, 1999), 216 Howard, Leslie, 42, 69 Howard, Ronald, 69 Howards End (James Ivory, 1992), 77 Hughes, Thomas, 64 Hume, Gary, 176 Hyde-White, Wilfrid, 62 Hynes, Samuel, 14 Hytner, Nicholas, 9 I Believe in You (Basil Deardon, 1952), 87 Ibsen, Henrik, 1 Ideal Husband, An (Alexander Korda, 1947), 95 Idealists, 2 If . . . (Lindsay Anderson, 1968), 71 Importance of Being Earnest, The (play), 68 Importance of Being Earnest, The (Anthony Asquith, 1952), 68 In Which We Serve (Noel Coward, David Lean, 1942), 45 Independent Theatre Society, 1 Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade (Steven Spielberg, 1989), 244

Innes, Christopher, 1 Islington Public Library, 145 Ivanhoe (Richard Thorpe, 1952), 99 Jack Ryan (novel), 8 Jackson, Russell, 94, 95 James, Henry, 2 Jameson, Fredric, 148 Javelin Films, 86 Jellicoe, Ann, 122 Johnson, Celia, 50 Jones, Liz, 188 Journey’s End (James Whale, 1930), 12 Juno and the Paycock (1930, Alfred Hitchcock), 22 Kammerspiele, 64 Kazan, Elia, 260 Kemble, Philip, 7 Kent, Jean, 62 Keyssar, Helene, 123 Kimmel, Michael, 180 Kinder, Marsha, 137 King George V, 47 King’s Speech, The (Tom Hooper, 2010), 261 Kinnell, Vicki R., 193 Knack . . . and How to Get It, The (Richard Lester, 1965), 121 Korda, Alexander, 95 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 179 Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), 226 Kruger, Loren, 6 Kushner, Tony, 261 Kustow, Michael, 122 Lacey, Stephen, 93 Lady in the Van, The (play, 1999), 258 Lady Vanishes, The (Alfred Hitchcock, 1938), 69 Lady Windermere’s Fan (play, 1892), 95 Ladykillers, The (Alexander Mackendrick, 1955), 88 Lahr, John, 148 Lambert, Gavin, 117 Larkin, Philip, 161 Law, Jude, 170 Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), 51 Lawrence, D.H., 118 Laying on of Hands, The (novella, 2001), 258 Lean, David, 44, 45 Leighton, Ronald, 14 Lejeune, C. A., 18, 50 Leone, Sergio, 248 Lerner, Alan Jay, 207 Lessing, Doris, 124 Lester, Richard, 121 Letter, The (William Wyler, 1940), 52

Index Limelight (Charles Chaplin, 1952), 113 Lion in Love, A (play, 1960), 125 Lithgow, John, 4 Little Foxes, The (William Wyler, 1941), 52 Lockwood, Margaret, 69 Loewe, Frederick, 207 London, 16 Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, The (Tony Richardson 1962), 88 Long Arm, The (Charles Frend, 1956), 88 Longest Journey, The (book, 1902), 64 Look Back in Anger (play, 1956), 63 Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1959), 63 Loom of Youth, The (book, 1929), 64 Loot (play, 1965), 145 Lord Alfred Douglas, 98 Lord Beaverbrook, 46 Lord Chamberlain’s Office, 1 Lord Mountbatten, 45 “Lost Chord, The,” 21 “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The,” 210 Lowe, Victoria, 22 Lunt, Alfred, 49 Lyttleton Theatre, 9, 228 Macpherson, Kenneth, 18 Madness of George III, The (play, 1991), 9, 258 Madness of King George, The (film, Nicholas Hytner, 1994), 258 Maggie, The (Alexander Mackendrick, 1954), 88 Magistrate, The (play, 1885), 4 Major Barbara (Gabriel Pascal, 1941), 49 Major, John, 175 Man Between, The (Carol Reed, 1953), 88 Man of No Importance, A (Suri Krishnamma, 1994), 81 Manchester Guardian, The, 115 Mandy (Alexander Mackendrick, 1952), 99 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 170 Map of the World, A (play, 1983), 216 Marat/Sade (play, 1963), 4 Marathon Man (John Schlesinger, 1976), 8 Marquess of Queensbury, 98 Martin, Steve, 229 Marwick, Arthur, 174 Mason, James, 68 Maude, Arthur, 13 Maugham, W. Somerset, 5 Maurice (James Ivory, 1987), 77 McArthur, Charles, 44 McFarlane, Brian, 50 McKellan, Ian, 229 Medhurst, Andy, 98

289

Mengele, Josef, 8 Merrick, David, 105 Metamorphoses (poem), 200 MGM, 52 Mills, John, 46, 48 Mirren, Helen, 261 Modern American Drama on Screen, 2 Modernism, 14 Modine, Matthew, 62, 77 Molloy, Dearbhla, 210 Momma Don’t Allow (Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, 1957), 106 Mons (Walter Summers, 1926), 28 Munich Crisis, 47 My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wei, 2007), 178 My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964), 206 Nabokov, Vladimir, 218 Nakayama, Randall S., 148 Naked Truth, The (Mario Zampi, 1957), 88 Naremore, James, 260 National Film Finance Corporation, the, 86 National Theatre, The, 4 Neame, Ronald, 46, 51 Nelligan, Kate, 228 Nelson, Tim Blake, 247 New Statesman and Nation, The, 99 New York City, 6 Newton, Robert, 49 Nichols, Mike, 8, 248 Noble, Peter, 56 Northam, Jeremy, 77 O (Tim Blake Nelson, 2000), 247 Observer, The, 50 Odeon Leicester Square, 99 Off-Broadway, 5 Offenbach, Jacques, 21 Off-Off Broadway, 5 Oh What A Lovely War (Richard Attenborough, 1969), 15 Old Vic Theatre, The, 6 Oldman, Gary, 249 Olivier, Laurence, 7 One of our Aircraft is Missing (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1942), 46 “Orpheus in the Underworld Overture,” 21 Orton, Joe, 145 Orwell, George, 58 Osborne, John, 63 Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1960), 59 Out of Africa (Sydney Pollack, 1985), 226 Ovid, 34 Oxford University, 63

290

Index

Palmer, R. Barton, 173 Panayi, Panikos, 177 Paramount Pictures, 6 Pascal, Gabriel, 35 Passage to India, A (David Lean, 1984), 57, 59, 77, 88 Passionate Friends, The (David Lean, 1949), 59 Patrick, Nigel, 62, 69 Peters, Sally, 32 Philadelphia Story, The (George Cukor, 1940), 268 Philistines, 2 Pinero, Arthur, 4 Pinter, Harold, 59, 170 Pitt, William (the Younger), 262 Pollack, Sydney, 227 Poppies of Flanders, The (Arthur Maude, 1927), 13 Portman, Eric, 69 Powell, Dilys, 18, 56 Present Laughter (play, 1939), 48 Price, Dennis, 48 Private Lives (play, 1930), 44 Pryce, Jonathan, 77 Puchner, Martin, 243 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 18 Pygmalion (play, 1912), 31 Pygmalion (film, Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, 1938), 86 Queen, The (Stephen Frears, 2006), 261 “Quintessence of Ibsenism, The,” 2 Question of Attribution, A (play, 1988), 259 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 44 Rank Organisation, The, 85, 86 Rattigan, Terence, 62 Raymond, Gary, 113 Reach for the Sky (Lewis Gilbert, 1956), 87 Reader, The (novel, 1995), 216 Realists, 2 Redford, Robert, 227 Redgrave, Michael, 62, 69 Reed, Carol, 59 Reid, Beryl, 163 Reinelt, Janelle, 230 Reisz, Karel, 94 Remains of the Day, The (James Ivory, 1993), 77 Remembrance (Bert Wynne, 1927), 13 Renaissance Theater Company, the, 8 Reveille (George Pearson, 1924), 23 Richard II (play, 1595), 57 Richards, Jeffrey, 11, 64 Richardson, Tony, 103 Rievaulx Abbey, 270 Robertson, James C., 10 Robinson, David, 117

Room at the Top (film, Jack Clayton, 1959), 114 Room with a View, A (James Ivory, 1985), 77 Rooney, David, 266 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (play), 236 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard, 1990), 236 Roth, Joanna, 248 Roth, Tim, 249 Routledge, Patricia, 258 Rowling, J. K., 125 Roxanne (Fred Schepisi, 1987), 229 Royal Court Theatre, the, 103 Royal Opera House, the, 4 Royal Shakespeare Company, the, 4 Royalty Theatre, the, 1 Rubin, Gale, 181 Rubyfruit Jungle (novel, 1973), 212 Rusinko, Susan, 63 Russell, Willy, 192 Russia House, The (Fred Schepisi, 1990), 244 Rutherford, Margaret, 94 Ryall, Tom, 62 Ryan’s Daughter (David Lean, 1970), 59 Saatchi, Charles, 176 Sacred Flame, The (play, 1928), 5 Salome (play, 1905), 4 Saltzman, Harry, 105 Sands, Julian, 62, 77 Sapphire (Basil Dearden, 1959), 87 Sarris, Andrew, 128 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (Karel Reisz, 1960), 81 Savoy Theatre, the, 16, 22 Scacchi, Greta, 62, 81 Schepisi, Fred, 218 Schlink, Bernhard, 216 Scoundrel, The (Ben Hecht, Charles McArthur, 1935), 89 Second Mrs. Tanqueray, The (play, 1893), 4 Selznick, David O., 59 Sembène, Ousmane, 218 Serpentine, the, 57 Seventh Veil, The (Compton Bennett, 1945), 275 Shaffer, Anthony, 169 Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998), 244 Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the, 93 Shakespeare, William, 242 Shaw, George Bernard, 2 Sherlock Holmes (Guy Ritchie, 2009), 178 Sherriff, R.C., 15 Shooting Stars (Anthony Asquith, 1928), 68 Shulman, Milton, 90 Sight and Sound, 117 Silkwood (Mike Nichols, 1983), 226

Index Silver, Alain, 51 Sinfield, Alan, 98 Sinyard, Neil, 139 Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993), 229 Sleuth (play, 1970), 169 Sleuth (film, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1972), 169 Sleuth (film, Kenneth Branagh, 2007), 169 Slovenia, 239 Smith, Brian, 69 Smith, Maggie, 258 Smut (novella, 2010), 258 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 172 Song of Bernadette, The (Henry King, 1943), 55 Sontag, Susan, 130 Sophie’s Choice (Alan J. Pakula, 1982), 226 South Bank Show (documentary, 1985), 51 Squibs (George Pearson, 1921), 23 St James’s Theatre, the, 91 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 261 Stage Society, the, 15 Stam, Robert, 218 Still Life (one-act play), 46 Sting, 229 Stoppard, Tom, 236 Strauss, Robert, 4 Streep, Meryl, 218 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Elia Kazan, 1951), 260 Strindberg, August, 118 Summer Madness (David Lean, 1955), 59 Summers, Walter, 13 Sunday Times, The, 18, 56 surrealism, 3 Sutton, England, 56 Talented Mr. Ripley, The (Anthony Minghella, 1999), 178 Talking Heads (TV, 1988), 258 Taste of Honey, A (play, 1958), 122 Taste of Honey, A (film, Tony Richardson, 1962), 142 Tatler, the, 18 Taylor, John Russell, 122, 123 Taylor, Paul, 266 Teddington, 56 Thatcher, Margaret, 175, 195 Théâtre du peuple, Le, 6 Theatre Royal Haymarket, the, 48, 129 Theatre Workshop, the (Stratford East), 122 This Happy Breed (Nöel Coward), 54 This Happy Breed (David Lean, 1944), 44 This Happy Breed (TV, 1957), 59 Thomas, Brandon, 89 Thompson, Emma, 77 Tiffany Studios, 12 Time Magazine, 104

291

Times Literary Supplement, The, 99 Tom Brown’s Schooldays (book, 1857), 64 Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963), 81 Tonight at 8.30 (play, 1935), 46 Travis, Bill, 75 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 32, 203 Trevelyan, John, 5 Tushingham, Rita, 137 Tutin, Dorothy, 87 Two Cities, 46 Ullman, Tracey, 229 Ultus (George Pearson, 1917), 23 Uncommon Reader, The (novella, 2007), 258 Underground (Anthony Asquith, 1928), 100 Untold Stories (memoir, 1999/2005), 258 Ure, Mary, 105 Ursini, James, 51 Venice Film Festival, 99 Verner, Guy, 48 Vidal, Gore, 250 Von Stroheim, Erich, 26 Vortex, The (play, 1923), 44 Vortex, The (Adrian Brunel, 1928), 22 Walker, Alexander, 129 Walker, Brenda, 103 Walsh, Kay, 49 Walters, Julie, 212, 258 Wansell, Geoffrey, 63 War Imagined, A (novel, 1990), 14 Warner Brothers Pictures, 113 Washington DC, 8 Waugh, Alec, 64 Way to the Stars, The (Anthony Asquith, 1945), 86 Ways of Seeing (TV, 1972), 182 Weiss, Peter, 4 Welles, Orson, 46 Welsh-Pearson Company, the, 12 Welthorpe, Edna, 146 Wembley Exhibition of 1924, the , 52 West End Theatre, the, 4, 48 West Orange, New Jersey, 6 Whale, James, 12 What the Butler Saw (play, 1969), 145 Wilde (Brian Gilbert, 1997), 178 Wilder, Billy, 55 Williams, Michael, 210 Williams, Tennessee, 31, 118, 260 Wind in the Willows, The (book, 1999), 259 Wing Pinero, Arthur, 89 Winnington, Richard, 18, 55 Winslow Boy, The (Anthony Asquith, 1948), 68 Winslow Boy, The (play, 1946), 62

292 Wolfenden Report (1957), 65 Woman in a Dressing Gown (J. Lee Thompson, 1957), 87 Woman in Question, The (Anthony Asquith, 1950 ), 68 Woman of No Importance, A (TV, 1982), 258 Wood, Charles, 128 Woodcraft Folk, 103 Woodfall Films, 105 Working Girl (Mike Nichols, 1988), 249 Wuthering Heights (William Wyler, 1939), 7, 54

Index Wyler, William, 51 Wynne, Bert, 13 Xala (Ousmane Sembène, 1975), 218 Young, B. A., 63 Ypres (Walter Summers, 1925), 13 Yugoslavia, 251 Zatlin, Phyllis, 131 Zeffirelli, Franco, 247 Zukor, Adolph, 6