While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 29 November 2021

Paul Miller directs a revival of one of the Orange Tree's most successful productions, Terence Rattigan's farce While the Sun Shines, first seen in 2019. Four of the original cast reprise their roles - Paul Labey as the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson as his manservant Horton, Michael Lumsden as his prospective father-in-law the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, and Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert - while three new cast members take the other roles - Rebecca Collingwood as the Earl's fiancée Lady Elizabeth Randall, Sophie Khan Levy as Mabel Crum (an independent woman of considerable acuity), and Conor Glean as the American Lieutenant Mulvaney.

It's a great pleasure to see again this entertaining production of an intricately plotted play in which the surface confusions and rivalries, which could have been merely superficial nonsense, unexpectedly reveal deeper truths about the workings of society and the pitfalls of over-hasty presumptions about how people will behave. There is something Shavian about the twists and turns by which the characters navigate the perils of social expectation and personal happiness.

See also my review of the original production at 

https://nicholasatthetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/06/while-sun-shines.html#more

Shaw Shorts

 by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 24 June 2020

Two short plays by Bernard Shaw, How He Lied to Her Husband (written in 1904 as a curtain raiser to Man of Destiny) and Overruled (written in 1912 for an evening of short pieces by various playwrights) herald the welcome return of live theatre with a small audience to this wonderful theatre in Richmond. 

Paul Miller, the artistic director of the Orange Tree, has form in reviving the classics of British drama, not least several scintillating productions of plays by Shaw. Here, two pieces rarely performed because they are so short - and because the idea of a 'curtain raiser' would probably be incomprehensible to a modern audience and unthinkable financially - are given the chance to remind us of Shaw's brilliant use of an absurd situation to expose the hypocrisies of social convention.

In How He Lied to Her Husband Henry Apjohn (Joe Bolland) has written sonnets in praise of Aurora Bompas (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). She has mislaid them, sure that her sister-in-law has purloined them and will show her husband Teddy (Jordan Mifsúd). In just a few turns of dialogue the dreamy romanticism that allows Henry to idolise Aurora is skewered by the curious mixture of carelessness and worldly wisdom exhibited by Aurora. The moment when social reality really begins to collide with high-flown sentiment is wonderfully managed by the shift of the lovers from using their christian names to using their formal titles ('Mr Apjohn', 'Mrs Bompas'), a social nicety with almost no practical force nowadays, but one which Shaw's unerring instinct for dramatic shorthand can still bring into play for an attentive audience. 

Masculine pretensions are further skewered by the arrival of Teddy Bompas. Has he seen the poems? Will he be outraged? Who will prevail in a fistfight? He is more angry when Apjohn attempts to deny that the sonnets were written to his wife than when he finally confesses that they have been - though the anger may be entirely confected. The suggestion that his wife is not worth writing love poems to is far more wounding than the threat of a love affair disrupting his marriage. It is brillint anarchic stuff, perfectly suited to a thirty minute exposition.

In Overruled Gregory Lunn (Alex Bhat) and Mrs Juno (Hara Yannas) have been conducting a shipboard romance - but Lunn is appalled to discover that he has mistaken Mrs Juno for a widow. With a ridiculous yelp he squawks that he has broken a sacred promise to his mother never to flirt with a married woman. Voices which each recognises as their respective spouses cause a flurry of alarm, but it transpires that Sibthorpe Juno (Jordan Mifsúd) and Mrs Lunn (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) have also been romancing on a cruise liner travelling in the opposite direction around the world. When the two couples meet, the ladies almost immediately form an urbane alliance (one thinks of Gwendolen and Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest) while the men desperately try to catch up with the unconventional possibilities of the situation. Shaw subtly indicates his own sympathies by allowing the wives to use the christian names of their husbands (one of them quite ridiculous) but withholding those of the women, thus buttressing them with a subtle authority. Once again, further development is superfluous.

It is so refreshing to see the conventions of 'mere' social comedy used so adroitly to raise issues as serious as the double standards between male and female propriety, the tiresomeness of male presumptions of superiority, and the innate common sense in women's negotiation of the social niceties. Even in a stripped down acting space, with half the seats removed from around the stage and an audience necessarily distanced from one another and facemasked, Shaw's provocative and whimsical humour, wonderfully embodied in this fine cast, still produces a welcome tonic and a challenge to the way we think and behave.

On the cultural front, Shaw and the Orange Tree 2 : pandemic 0 

Candida

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 28 November 2019

Paul Miller directs Martin Hutson as the Rev James Mavor Morell, Claire Lams as his wife Candida, Michael Simkins as his father-in-law Mr Burgess, Sarah Middleton as Miss Proserpine Garnett ('Prossey'), his secretary, Kwaku Mills as the Rev Alexander Mill, his curate, and Joseph Potter as Mr Eugene Marchbanks, an 18-year-old poet who is also a family friend. This is Paul Miller's fourth revival of an early Shaw play in the last five years; I've seen two others and this, like them, is excellent.

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 18 June 2019

Paul Miller directs this sparkling revival of one of Rattigan's most successful and popular plays, written in 1943 and set in London - indeed in the celebrated chambers of the Albany off Piccadilly - during the Second World War. In a great ensemble cast Philip Labey plays the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson his manservant Horton, Julian Moore-Cook the American Lieutenant Mulvaney, Sabrina Bartlett the Earl's fiancée Landy Elisabeth Randall, Michael Lumsden her father the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert and Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Mabel Crum.

Humble Boy

by Charlotte Jones

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 29 March 2018

Paul Miller directs this first London-based revival of Charlotte Jones's 2001 play, featuring Jonathan Broadbent as Felix Humble, Belinda Lang as his mother Flora Humble, Selina Cadell as Mercy Lott, Christopher Ravenscroft as Jim, Paul Bradley as George Pye and Rebekah Hinds as his daughter Rosie Pye. The production is designed by Simon Daw.

The play concerns Felix, a potentially brilliant astrophysicist, returning home for his father's funeral and being faced with his poisonous mother, now interested in marrying George Pye. Life is further complicated by the fact some seven years earlier, Felix had had an affair with George's daughter Rosie; only now does he discover that Rosie's seven year old daughter is named Felicity 'after his father'.

Misalliance

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 14 December 2017

Paul Miller directs his third Shaw play at the ever-impressive Orange Tree Theatre (unfortunately I missed his The Philanderer though I saw Widowers' Houses in 2015). The new play fizzes with ideas and with almost absurd social situations, but the witticisms reveal unexpected truths and often surprisingly painful tensions, both between characters, and between the social roles people live by and their own (usually flattering) images they have of themselves.

In the hands of an excellent cast the now-unfashionable wordiness of Shaw is managed with great verve and dexterity; the speed of delivery is perhaps only possible in such an intimate space, but it certainly helps in preventing the play from being bogged down by its own verbiage. What lifts Shavian cleverness into something more probing is the deft revelations of depths of character beneath the surface brilliance of the dialogue. From the peculiar camp narcissism of Rhys Isaac-Jones's Bentley Summerhayes to the worldly-weariness of Simon Shepherd as his father Lord Summerhayes, from the brittle self-righteousness of Jordan Mifsúd's interloper to the bullying suavity of Luke Thallon's Joey Percival, we see people who can experience real pain, which their superficial behaviour can mask but not entirely conceal. 

The Lottery of Love

by Pierre Marivaux translated by John Fowles

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 8 April 2017

This is the first staged prodiction of John Fowles's version of Marivaux's play Le Jeu de l'Amour et du Hasard though there was a workshop at the National in 1984. It is directed by Paul Miller and designed by Simon Daw, and features Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Sylvia, Claire Lams as Louisa (her maid), Pip Donaghy as Mr Morgan (her father), Tam Williams as Martin (her brother), Ashley Zhangazha as Richard (her suitor) and Keir Charles as John Brass (his manservant).

French Without Tears

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 11 November 2015

Terrence Rattigan's reputation, skewered by the so-called 'Angry Young Men' in the 1950s, has risen again in the last couple of decades with a series of impressive revivals of his more weighty plays. 'French Without Tears', his first major success from 1936, is a farce, but as is often the case with Rattigan, there are serious undertones which point to a real, if unacknowledged, fragility in many of the characters.

This production, directed by Paul Miller, features a young cast, (two professional debuts and several recent graduates) with David Whitworth playing the only senior role, M. Maingot. Managing a farce in a small acting space with the audience on four sides and the front row on the stage floor level is quite an accomplishment, and the actors managed this with enormous vitality and skill. While at times the public schoolboy accents may have seemed a trifle overdone in the small space, the overall effect was completely convincing - another of the secrets of a successful production: if the cast is too knowing or the speaking too exaggerated the effect falls flat.

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.