Each His Own Wilderness

by Doris Lessing

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 4 May 2015

The play, directed by Paul Miller (the Artistic Director of the theatre), features Clare Holman as Myra, Joel MacCormack as Tony and Susannah Harker as Milly. It was written in 1958, just before Lessing embarked on her novel 'The Golden Notebook' (1962).

Myra, heavily involved in the campaign against the H-bomb, and with a lifetime of political activism behind her, is completely non-plussed by the apolitical attitude of her son Tony, just returned from National Service. He affects complete scorn for her chaotic and bohemian lifestyle, and is woundingly critical of all her attempts at a rapprochement. Her assumptions that he as a young man must want freedom and autonomy he sees as just one more example of her inescapable manipulative influence over him. His apparent desire to be an electrician (instead of an architect) living in a 'normal' tidy household with an attractively made-up and dignified mother she sees as irrelevant and insulting immaturity. 

Such cross-generational cross-purposes are only worsened by the fact that Myra's current lover Sandy is Tony's contemporary - so inevitably Tony involves himself with Sandy's mother Milly, who is one of his mother's best friends. Adding further to the cocktail of confusion and pain is an old flame of Myra's, who has brought his fiancée to stay at Myra's house prior to the wedding, while Mike, who has held a candle for Myra for decades, also hovers haplessly on the scene, his hopes raised and then cruelly dashed by Myra's imperious need to be 'free'.

Lessing's view of good intentions thwarted by mutual incomprehension and controlled by theories of how things should be at the expense of a clearer understanding of the needs of specific individuals is bleak. Myra is in some ways a descendant of the philanthropic Mrs Jellyby of 'Bleak House' who pays no close attention to her domestic situation, but far from being a caricature she veers between a conviction that her approach is correct, and a vulnerable incomprehension that things have not worked out as she expected. Tony, a far more brutal child than Caddy Jellyby, tries for ironic detachment, but lashes out when pressed, revealing a devastating mixture of boyish hurt and egotistic cruelty.

Clare Holman brings a crackling energy to the character of Myra, but is equally good at revealing the flashes of insecurity beneath - at a loss with her son, fearful of encroaching age, at times brittle, but not in the end enlightened by self-questioning. Joel MacCormack is outstanding as Tony - pale, reserved, exasperated, but also sarcastic and selfish. Even as he delivered the most crushing blows in response to  his mother's waywardness, there were tears streaming down his face.  One's sympathies for either of these characters are constantly engaged then dashed as they taunt one another from habit, thwarted affection and  deep pain. 

The minor characters are not so fully written, but they were well acted in this production, in particular Susannah Harker evincing a sultry world-weariness as Milly, and Rosie Holden reacting to all the turmoil with a wounded bafflement as the unfortunate fiancée Rosemary.

The play is set 'in the hall' of a large suburban house (a domestic haven with diametrically and fatally opposed resonances for Myra and Tony). This is a peculiarly difficult space to embody in the almost square configuration of the theatre, with audience seats on all four sides, but the design (Tom Roger) gives an excellent impression of the domestic chaos of the household, with pamphlets, books and newpapers spread everywhere, a sofa bed awkwardly in the way, and a wonderful tiled floor from another age underneath it all.