Running until 13th April 2013
Played in Donmar Warehouse, Trelawny of the Wells by Arthur Wing Pinero is a beautiful tribute to the theatrical medium itself and the heart of Covent Garden could not be a more appropriate place. The theatre is an intimate space, with nineteenth century lamps all along the edge of the stage and a set to die for in its attention to detail. When I heard that Joe Wright (of Atonement, Pride & Prejudice and Anna Karenina) was putting on a play in the West End, I knew I could not miss it.
I went with the expectation of visually stunning theatrics and while it was not as dramatic as I had thought, the detail was exact. The story itself is about a band of players, but more about their star, Rose Trelawny, who is leaving the theatre world to marry her love, Arthur, a character not unlike those played by Hugh Grant in the 90s. The subplot surrounds the players – the ‘gypsies’ as the initimate Sir William, Arthur’s grandfather, calls them – and their struggle to survive, most aptly represented by the character Tom, who writes a play about his friends that is ‘real’, as in, real people with real troubles, none of the garish sentimentality of musicals that they so often find themselves in. While Trelawny of the Wells is hypertheatrical and camp and a little over the top, it underlines the revolution spurred on by Tom and his emphasis on the art of theatre and its effective methods at transporting people not only to fantasy, but to reality. This is a show that pays tribute to the beauty of theatre, both aesthetically and personally.
The Guardian pitched it as “a perfectly amiable evening” but noted that “Wright can’t help pushing Pinero’s faithful re-creation of a past theatrical age to the edge of caricature.” I would counter with the observation that that is the point. The theatre Pinero was recreating was one that hinged on operatics, pantomime and slapstick. His band of players, the ‘gypsies’, are shunned from high society, in the form of Sir William, Vice-Chancellor of Cavendish Square, played excellently by Ron Cook, and Rose cannot feel at home in the high house of so many rules – no sneezing, no singing, a silent half hour after supper, no courting, no privacy and no noise during whist. Sir William and his sister Trafalgar are caricatured from the start as snobbish aristocrats, but after Rose leaves and Arthur, heartbroken, sneaks out and runs away to Bristol, Sir William undergoes a sudden and moving change of heart. The caricature in the play underlines how people are caricatured by others in real life. When they show feeling, there is absolute silence in the theatre.
I was one of the lucky audience members who had the £10 front row tickets, and found myself giggling halfway through the last act when pushed over in my seat to make way for the character of O’Dwyer, the Irish theatre-owner, (played by Jamie Beamish) who scribbled some hilarious notes on his notebook props (“Freezing”, “Rough day”, “Jaysus”) and returned no less than three times to take my place with a new greeting, “I’m back,” “Thought you’d got rid of me, hah?”. The cast hit just the right amount of audience interaction, specifically the scene in which Ron Cook is playing the lady Becky, who dithers about Rose to prepare for her last meeting with Sir William. There is a beautiful moment when Rose urges Becky to let the man in, and Becky turns, anxious and weary, to the audience, before leaving the stage, emerging only seconds later in perfect attire as Sir William, which gathered a huge and affectionate round of applause.
The show itself is only two and a half hours and at certain points I was afraid of snorting with laughter. It is, as the Guardian puts it, “a perfectly amiable evening”, but to make it seem that diminutive is a falsehood. Thankfully their review does go on to point out another strength -
You sense the cyclical nature of change in the delicious moment when Peter Wight as a well-cured ham announces he’s been cast in Wrench’s new play as “an old stagey, out-of-date actor”: there’s a long, pregnant silence before Maggie Steed as his wife tentatively asks, “Will you be able to get near it, James?” And it’s hard to resist the scene where Cook, now playing the tyrannical grandfather, lapses into awed reverence when confronted by the sword used by Edmund Kean in Richard III. This makes Pinero’s point that the onset of the new has to be accompanied by a celebration of the past.
Moreover, I think it is necessary to stress that the caricatures rendered on stage in conjunction with the rapid change of pace the characters experience highlight the touching individuality to each of them. By the end of the story they had proven themselves to be whole people, just as Tom had pictured.
There are only 6 more days to see it, so get your hands on a ticket now!
