Variation on a Theme, Finborough, 15.3.14

"As far as I could see the star of the show was Norman Hartnell, from whose contributions - a white diamante sack, a shocking pink cocktail dress in pleated chiffon, a casual ensemble of blouse and pedal-pushing slacks, and a two-tiered ball-gown in navy-blue pebble-crepe-the lean extremities of Margaret Leighton nervously protruded.  Miss Leighton, traipsing about looking wry and motherly, knocking back brandies and making rueful little moues of despair, modelled the clothes splendidly.  I didn't spot much real acting going on, but then there wasn't much reality to begin with."  (Ken Tynan savaging Gielgud's original production of Terry Rattigan's 'Variation on a Theme', back in 1958)



Rachael Stirling: just born
to wear an evening gown! 

Motley will declare his affiliations straightaway:  he's fond of Terry Rattigan's oeuvre.  So when it was announced that Earl’s Court’s tiny Finborough Theatre, very much terra incognita for the East London Motley, were staging this historical curio, only its second-ever production since the disastrous 1958 opening production, he had to see it, even though that meant queuing for 90 minutes for returns for a show who's whole run is sold out.

Happily, dear reader, he got in, and had the chance to see the work which famously inspired Shelagh Delaney to go home declaring ‘I can do better than that’, and thence onward and upward to write “A Taste of Honey”. 

No longer en route for 'The Magic Mountain': 
Stirling's Rose choosing love - and thus death from consumption
- over a retreat to a Swiss sanatorium

I could understand why this campy tale of fading Riviera actresses selling their bodies to shady "gutter tycoons" to keep themselves in mink (whilst wasting their lives on brandy and baccarat) might have got under the craw of the kitchen-sink brigade.  There was more than a hint of the Tennessee Williams's about it.

Inspired by Dumas’s ‘La Dame aux Camellias’, one couldn't help thinking 1958 was a little late for a ‘dying consumptive’ plot-line.  As Tynan famously put it:  "Master Terence makes no bones about his sources.  Trouble is, he makes no flesh either."  The play's mordant views on human motivation, and its mercantile take on the female of the species (Rose has married serially for money) were, on the surface, scarcely calculated to endear it to the young or the idealistic. 

Rachael Stirling converting Martin McCreadle's Ron
to the joys of bisexuality

However, Michael Oakley’s production at the Finborough delivered superb performances all round.  Rachael Stirling was vampy-and-vulnerable as the consumptive Rose (coming close to reprising her role as Yelena in the magnificent 2007 Wilton's production of ‘Vanya’).  Rose, poor thing, has gone through three husbands' money and is down to her last few thousand, kept from penury only by the capable ministrations of her "ladies’ companion” Hettie, a Duke’s daughter no less.  Torn between shady billionaire Kurt (Phil Cheadle, saddled by Rattigan with risibly cod-Teutonic malapropisms) and poor-but-hunky ballet dancer Ron (newcomer Martin McCreadle), she initially chooses "the lolly man", before finally and not before time recognising that love (or more accurately, perhaps, lust) trumps cash every time. 

Martin McCreadle, channelling Brando,
faces his foe Hettie (Susan Tracey)

The supporting cast were quite on a par with Ms Stirling, particularly Susan Tracey as the magnificently clipped and sensible  'paid help' Hettie, Rose's emotional rock.  Martin McCreadle's well-upholstered Ron pirouetted around the stage, half Nijinsky and half Brando, to the point where one could almost overlook his character's bizarre alternation between Russian and Brummie accents.  Emma Amos corpsed her way through some fun cameo turns as vapid pouting American heiress Mona, the doyenne of the canasta table.  A dash of bisexual spice was added in Act Two when Ron’s world-weary gay patron Sam (David Shelley) got to "have-it-out" with the woman who'd effectively stolen his protégé:

"You don't seem to understand that the Rons of this world always end by hating the people they need.  They can't help it.  It's compulsive.  Of course if probably isn't plain hate.  It's love-hate, or hate-love, or some other Freudian jargon - but it's still a pretty good imitation of the real thing.  You see - when day after day, and night after night - you're being kicked hard and steadily in the teeth, it's not all that important what the character who's doing it feels for you.  You can leave that to the psychiatrists to work out.  All you can do is nurse a broken jaw and, in your own good time, get the hell out.  I'll give you six months - from the honeymoon.  Take a bet?"  (Jilted Sam, possibly giving voice to Rattigan's own feelings about gold-diggers, in his Act Two confrontation with Rose.) 

We were back again in Rattigan-land, where the primary dangers are self-deception and emotional repression, and where, in the counsel that Rose ascribes to Hettie, "you can expel Nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes back".  The lead character had spent so long "fighting Nature to get where she was" (very comfortably ensconced on the Riviera) that she'd almost forgotten how to love.  It took a 'naked' declaration of "need" from the more-vulnerable-than-he-appeared Ron to awaken her own need to love.

The problem for Rattigan was that this message, which came out much more clearly upon reading the well-constructed text, got slightly lost in the high camp fun of the show.  This reflected a degree of trying to have-his-cake-and-eat-it.  Rattigan was simultaneously preaching the virtues of being true to yourself and slating the vacuousness of the lives of the Cannes set (the 0.001%) whilst revelling in their Lagondas, Christian Dior one-pieces and champagne martinis.  Hopefully an excellent production fifty-six years late will do something to restore the reputation of an overlooked work.